In the fifth of their series of briefs looking at the labour market impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, statistician Andrew Mitchell and GLRC Director Luann Good Gingrich examine the intersecting power dynamics defined by gender, nationality/race/ethnicity, and age that result in compounding vulnerabilities and economic exclusion, using data from the monthly Labour Force Survey (LFS) conducted by Statistics Canada.
The “viral inequality” of the COVID-19 pandemic and resulting recession has exposed the deepening and precise segmentation of the Canadian labour market. Our examination of labour market outcomes in the previous four research briefs highlighted the importance of examining a wide range of social and economic factors and their influence on the profoundly uneven experiences of the “pandem-ecession”. In this brief, we use regression modeling of Statistics Canada’s public-use Labour Force Survey (LFS) data to continue our investigation of labour market impacts of COVID-19. With an eye to detail and precision, we look for the story beneath the story.
In each of our analyses to date, we have seen that while the effects of the pandemic have been more severe for immigrants, women, and youth, our results have uncovered varying impacts across these groups. Not all immigrants, or all women, or all youth have suffered equally. In this brief, we employ multivariate regression techniques to better isolate how labour market impacts of the pandemic may differ between and within sociodemographic groups once we control for factors such as province, age, education, family type, and immigrant status. Our focus is on the intersecting power dynamics defined by gender, nationality/race/ethnicity, and age that result in compounding vulnerabilities and economic exclusion.