How the Pandemic Has Reshaped Economic Inclusion in the United States - Mark E. Schweitzer and Emily Dohrman*

First, we see that employment-to- The employment-to-population ratio is a very simple population ratios by age group are fairly constant over time, statistic for measuring how actively engaged a group is in although the ratios tend to be procyclical in the sense that the economy: It is simply the fraction of a set of people the fraction of the working-age population that is employed who are employ. [...] To dig a little deeper race or ethnicity and gender, the pattern of the slowly into the changes, a group’s employment-to-population ratio adjusting series being abruptly altered by the pandemic and can be split into changes in the group’s unemployment rates continuing to adjust distinctly for the different groups is the and changes in the group’s labor force participation rates. [...] The sum of the two bars for each age group Percent indicates the size of the loss during the pandemic (April 100 2019 to April 2020), the dark blue bar shows how much 35-44 of that loss was recovered by April 2021, the light blue bar 80 45-54 shows the unrecovered portion, and the green bar shows 25-34 any gain above what was lost during the pandemic.1 We 60 20-24 make the year-over-year compariso. [...] The 2021–2019 difference is less than the loss during the pandemic for all groups except those aged 16–19; that difference exceeds that group’s loss during the Note: The change in the employment-to-population ratio is the pandemic, and the excess above the loss is labeled a gain. [...] Differences in how the most of the changes that we identify are the result of the recovery has progressed across demographic groups, in pandemic and the recovery of the labor market.