The COVID-19 pandemic has caused many women to leave the workforce in order to take care of their family and while some are waiting for in-person school to resume so they can return to work, their job might not be there when they get back.

Toronto-based bakery and cooking school owner Lisa Sanguedolce employed just over 20 workers before the pandemic, but now she’s down to 14. She said most of the layoffs have been female workers with young children.

Sanguedolce said she hasn’t heard from most of the mothers on when they can finally return, so she’s had to fill those positions with other people.

“We had a lot of women that have young children that have not come back to work because they had no childcare, they were homeschooling and they couldn’t commute… We’ve had to fill their roles, so they don’t really have a job to come back to,” the owner of Le Dolci said in an interview. 

“I would like to have them come back, but then what do I do with the people I’ve hired in the interim who were also out of work because the food businesses suffered so greatly?”

A study by the Center for Global Development found women took on an additional 173 hours of unpaid childcare last year, compared to 59 additional hours for men.

The extra childcare commitment has amounted to an estimated US$800 billion in lost income for women in 2020, according to a report by Oxfam International.

Employment setbacks have been dubbed the “she-cession” by some economists, with more females having to leave the workforce than men during the COVID-19 pandemic largely due to family affairs.

“One of our new hires was going to be a woman with three children after three years of being out of the workforce,” Sanguedolce said.

“We sent her a contract and then in the last lockdown she had to reject it because she had to then homeschool her kids and help with all of the stuff she just couldn’t do with working full-time again.”

Sanguedolce said the worst part about many female staff members leaving indefinitely is the loss of talent at her business.

“It’s been a really rough time because we have lost some of our most talented chefs and pastry cake decorators because of women taking the brunt.”