Day 1,377: Apparently thinking it’s 1920, Trump to Michigan women: ‘We’re getting your husbands back to work’

There are plenty of questions as to the exact time period that Donald Trump thinks was “great,” when he shouts, “Make America great again” at rallies.

But at a rally in Lansing, Michigan, Trump seemed to think that it is currently 1920, not 2020. Speaking directly to women about fallout from the coronavirus, he rambled, “I’m also getting your husbands, they want to get back to work, right? They want to get back to work. We’re getting your husbands back to work, and everybody wants it.”

Except plenty of women work too. The labor force in the U.S. is about half women, actually. And the COVID-19 pandemic has disproportionally destroyed women’s jobs. Worldwide, women are 1.8 times more likely to lose their jobs due to COVID-19 than men. Those numbers are affecting U.S. women too.

Factoring in industry-mix effects suggests that women would make up 43 percent of job losses. However, unemployment data indicate that women make up 54 percent of the overall job losses to date.

This is largely due to the type of fields men and women work in and leaves women far more vulnerable to massive job losses than men.

The nature of work remains significantly gender specific: women and men tend to cluster in different occupations in both mature and emerging economies. This, in turn, shapes the gender implications of the pandemic: our analysis shows that female jobs are 19 percent more at risk than male ones simply because women are disproportionately represented in sectors negatively affected by the COVID-19 crisis.

So instead of lecturing married, straight women about their husbands’ jobs, Trump would be better off explaining what he is doing about the jobs of all women — single, married, gay, straight — considering the nation is in the midst of the “first female recession,” and there is no end in sight.

1,377 days in, 85 to go

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