The COVID-19 pandemic caused large and lasting disruptions to labor markets. While this disruption was happening, however, data reveals that the economy had a hidden strain of hope and resilience via growth in the births of new establishments and employment associated with those births.
As North Carolina’s economy continues to recover from the recession caused by the COVID pandemic, we wanted to investigate how women’s employment and earnings were affected to complement other recent LEAD research.
In previous LEAD Feed posts, we examined changes in employment between men and women over the course of the pandemic. Data revealed that the number of employed women grew faster than that of men and without significantly cutting their amount of time worked. Today, we look at one reason why women’s employment rebounded from the depths of the Covid Recession so quickly – self-employment.
North Carolina's seasonally adjusted unemployment rate decreased from January’s revised rate of 3.9 percent.