The cover story: Women and the pandemic

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The Cover Story Women and the Pandemic By Eliana Dockterman Staff Writer, TIME As a journalist, I've found it challenging to talk about sensitive subjects over Zoom this past year. The image can be grainy or the sounds can drop out. But what's most difficult is conveying to someone who has experienced trauma that you are present, that you are listening, that you are a human on the other side of the screen. Still, when Tamara Brown began to tear up telling the story of how she was fired during the pandemic after expressing childcare concerns to her employer, the tears came easily on my end too. For women like Brown, losing childcare wasn't an inconvenience. It was the beginning of a fight for survival. When daycares and schools closed last spring, mothers often became the default caregivers, regardless of whether they had jobs that demanded their attention or physical presence. More than 2.3 million women have left the workforce since February 2020, and according to one analysis, one in three women not working cited childcare as the reason. Some are still struggling to make ends meet. One woman, Amanda Andrews, told me her daughter offered to break open her piggy bank to help pay the bills. It's a national crisis with no end in sight. For this week's issue of TIME, I spoke to women like Brown who asked for leave or the ability to work from home when their childcare fell through during the pandemic and subsequently lost their jobs. Now they're suing. These women don't know if they're going to win, but they told me that they just had this gut feeling that they had been wronged—that a woman shouldn't be forced to choose between the job that provides for her children and caring for those children. This story is just one of a number of pieces in this week's issue on the ways women have kept fighting in a world that fails them. It tells the stories of the women creating free community refrigerators to feed American families, women in one Mexican border city who started a clinic for pregnant asylum-seekers stuck in limbo, women leading India's farm-worker revolution, and women trying to curb a domestic violence epidemic in Russia. These women shouldn't have to be so strong, but that doesn't make their strength any less worthy of recognition. Read the Story » Share the cover story

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