Labor Market Experiences of US Veterans During COVID-19: Women’s Relative Advantage

While recessions typically affect men’s employment more adversely than women’s in the USA, the COVID-19 recession was an exception to this trend. In this paper, we focus on the veteran population and ask whether COVID-19 affected employment outcomes differently for veteran women than veteran men. Using Current Population Survey data, we find that the COVID-19 recession had less serious effects on veteran women relative to veteran men in multiple aspects of employment conditions. We offer potential explanations for this finding and ultimately provide evidence of heterogeneity in labor market experiences based on types of recessions, gender, and population subgroups.