Report: AAPI women suffering the most from COVID-19 job losses

Asian American and Pacific Islander women have experienced the highest rates of long-term unemployment during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted the lives and livelihoods of millions of Americans due to increased morbidity, mortality, and unemployment rates. Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) women in particular, have been significantly disproportionally impacted by the pandemic, facing an alarming increase in race/ethnicity- and gender-based discrimination, violence, and job losses.

Government data reveal that AAPI women experienced the highest rates of long-term unemployment of any racial/ethnic groups in the U.S. in 2020, concludes a report by the National Asian Pacific American Women's Forum, NAPAWF.

 

Almost half (44%) of all AAPI women who experienced job losses in 2020 have been out of work for longer than six months. This staggering statistic is likely a result of the intersectional effects of a number of factors such as race- and gender-based discrimination, immigration status, and working in jobs that make them more susceptible to both workplace harassment and job losses. 

AAPI women are overrepresented in both the front-line and low-wage workforces: they make up 3.8% of the front-line workforce, despite only making up 2.9% of the overall workforce, and are typically paid less than their white male counterparts in the same occupations, says the NAPAWF analysis.

UCLA 

These "essential" frontline occupations include, but are not limited to, restaurant workers, salon workers, retail workers, and personal care aides, that includes nurses and caregivers to the elderly. Not only were the aforementioned jobs disproportionately impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, but working in such jobs also makes AAPI women increasingly susceptible to anti-AAPI violence and discrimination. 

Among the employees in who have continued to work, they often having to take health risks by continuing to interact with customers, patients and the public, says a study by UCLA. Among non-essential workers, many were able to work remotely from home. This is particularly true for white-collar employees and professionals. The group hit the hardest economically were non-essential workers who could not work remotely or worked for a fIrm that shut down. 

Racist incidents targeting AAPIs increased by 150% between 2019 and 2020. A staggering 70% of the incidents reported in 2020, the height of the coronavirus pandemic, were by women or gender nonbinary individuals with many of these incidents happening in workplaces and in places of business.

The NAPAWF-conducted national survey found that nearly 78% of AAPI women have been affected by anti-AAPI racism in the last two years. A fear of facing violence and discrimination at the workplace, especially in low-wage jobs, further reduces AAPI women’s ability to re-enter the workforce. 

In December 2020, the economy lost 140,000 jobs – all of them women’s jobs, according to the National Women’s Law Center.

"Many times Asian women have an especially high burden of domestic work and child care responsibilities in families, and with all the children at home, it's just been harder," Alexandra Suh, executive director of the Koreatown Immigrant Workers Alliance in Los Angeles, told USA Today. "They also have more involvement with elder care. There's so many pressures with the pandemic."

AAPI women’s immigration status also plays a significant role in their employment, especially during the pandemic. From March 2020 through February 2021, immigrant women experienced the largest unemployment rates of any group in the United States, including US-born men, US-born women, and immigrant men.

In May 2020, the unemployment rate for AAPI immigrant women increased to 17%.

Disaggregating data

Given that nearly 70% of adult Asians in the U.S. are foreign-born, with many being recent immigrants or refugees, the AAPI community’s workforce participation was again disproportionately impacted, this time due to immigration-related job losses. 

Due to the combined effects of immigration, occupational segregation, and gender-based harassment and violence, disaggregating data by ethnicity, immigration status, and gender on employment for the AAPI community is of critical importance.

By lumping data under the umbrella term of "Asian American," the impact of the coronavirus on certain ethnicities are hidden and perpetuate the “model minority” myth. 

The AAPI community is a vast and incredibly diverse group encompassing more than 50 ethnic subgroups speaking more than 100 languages and dialects. There may be critical differences in the rates of unemployment among different ethnicities, and lumping us all together not only fails to acknowledge that, it also erases many of our distinct economic issues that need to be addressed. 

For example, AAPI women working full-time are typically paid, on average, 85 cents for every dollar paid to their white male counterparts. However, disaggregated data from 2015 to 2019 reveal that many AAPI women experience much larger wage gaps, particularly Southeast Asian and Pacific Islander women. Samoan and Tongan women only earn 60 cents for every white male dollar, Nepalese women only earn 54 cents for every white male dollar, and Burmese women earn only 52 cents for every white male dollar.

"They’re serving your food, they’re doing your nails and they’re caring for your children and your elderly," Sung Yeon Choimorrow, executive director of the NAPAWF, told USA Today. "There are Asians in these jobs that people don’t often think about."