The #WomenLaborCOVID Project: Tracking Inequality

In the spring of 2020, we grew curious about the impact of the pandemic on women in the workplace. While we believed there was a disproportionate fallout from the shutdowns, even traditional tracking measures like unemployment applications would only tell part of the story. Using Zotero, we tracked and captured news stories related to the evolving interests and topics, published reports of measured impacts such as women leaving the workforce , and articles which captured positive and negative depictions of women and work. Over two years we collected over 1500 news stories, with supplemental early research papers and other preliminary government reports. This dataset allows us observe trends and to explore interdisciplinary questions related to anthropology, linguistics, economics, health, and women's studies. Initial student projects have focused on the motherhood penalty and the impact of the pandemic on pregnant women. Dataset queries have also been used to examine the representation of fathers in pandemic-related news stories. Our current themes for investigation include the over-representation of women in the service industry, the conflicts between caregiving tasks and work, and the disparate news representations related to race and socioeconomic status. This presentation will introduce the #WomenLaborCOVID project and the open bibliography to discuss how others could engage with the project and the dataset, the limitations, and opportunities for this method of data capture. While the early parts of the pandemic have passed, it continues to significantly impact women’s real or perceived engagement at work and reveal the conflicts with ever growing care tasks in a world with new and continuing disease related disruptions.