The New York Times: April 18, 2020, How Millions of Women Became the Most Essential Workers in America
Every day, Constance Warren stands behind the cold cuts counter at a grocery store in New Orleans, watching the regular customers come and go. They thank Warren and tell her they do not like being stuck indoors, waiting out the epidemic. She wraps their honey-smoked turkey and smiles.
It is good to have a job right now, the mixed fortune of being deemed an essential worker. But she wonders whether, once everyday life is safe again, people will remember the role she played when it was not.
From the cashier to the emergency room nurse to the drugstore pharmacist to the home health aide taking the bus to check on her older client, the soldier on the front lines of the current national emergency is most likely a woman.
One in three jobs held by women has been designated as essential, according to a New York Times analysis of census data crossed with the federal government’s essential worker guidelines. Nonwhite women are more likely to be doing essential jobs than anyone else.
