TY  - RPRT
        AU  - Alon, Titan
AU  - Doepke, Matthias
AU  - Olmstead-Rumsey, Jane
AU  - Symons-Hicks, James
AU  - Tertilt, Michèle
        TI  - This Time It's Different: The Role of Women's Employment in Recessions
        PY  - 2026/Jul/
        PB  - Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)
        CY  - Bonn
        T2  - IZA Discussion Paper
        IS  - 18830
        UR  - https://www.iza.org/publications/dp18830
        AB  - We study the transmission of macroeconomic shocks in a model of the household sector featuring single and married households, joint labor-supply decisions of women and men, and childcare needs that interact with the availability of remote work. Recessions concentrated among women are deeper and more persistent than those concentrated among men, reflecting weaker within-family insurance and a new empirical finding that women re-enter employment more slowly after job loss. Yet recovery from the pandemic recession, which had a disproportionate impact on working women due to school closures and the sectoral distribution of job losses, was surprisingly rapid. We show that in our model, the expansion of remote work and shifting caregiving norms after the pandemic raise female labor supply and men's share of childcare, thereby accounting for the observed recovery. These changes permanently increase female participation and narrow the gender earnings gap, but their effect on future recessions is limited: greater labor force attachment among women weakens the added-worker effect but also accelerates labor market re-entry, leading to offsetting effects on aggregate recession dynamics.
        KW  - recessions
KW  - business cycle
KW  - he-cession
KW  - she-cession
KW  - pandemic recession
KW  - job loss
KW  - added worker effect
KW  - gender equality
KW  - female employment
KW  - school closures
KW  - childcare
KW  - gender wage gap
        ER  -