As any summer traveller knows, many people working in the tourism industry these days seem overworked and stressed out. Leisure and hospitality was far harder hit than any other industry in the US during the pandemic, and it is still struggling to keep up, with some 1.4mn jobs unfilled compared with pre-pandemic levels.
This isn’t about a lack of demand — people may be scaling back, or taking vacations closer to home, but they are still travelling. Indeed, post-pandemic travel spending hit a new high in May, according to the non-profit US Travel Association.
In fact, the continued labour shortage in this industry is indicative of a bigger and more problematic trend, which is the loss of women in the workforce, particularly female workers without a college degree. This is a trend that has been building since the 2001 recession; since then, less educated women have seen larger drops in labour force participation and slower…
