Canada’s economy has 858,000 fewer jobs than it did before the pandemic, according to the most recent job numbers from Statistics Canada, but the impact varies widely according to industry.

Not all job sectors are evenly comprised of men and women, and, generally speaking, it’s been industries where women dominate in numbers that have been more often impacted, such as retail, hospitality and food services.

According to a new analysis by the Royal Bank published Thursday, nearly 100,000 working-age Canadian women have completely left the workforce since the pandemic started, which means they aren’t trying to get a job any more. The figure for men is more than 10 times smaller — a sign that, on the whole, they are not feeling quite so gloomy about their prospects.

Jerty Gaa, 54, is one of the nearly 500,000 women in Canada who remain unemployed amid the pandemic. She’s still holding out hope she’ll be able to get her job as a hotel attendant back once vaccines are distributed and things return to normal. Otherwise, given her skill set, she could end up in a new job that pays half as well.

Gaa said she’s had to dip into her retirement savings while one of her daughters, who works in the casino industry, has also been forced out of work.

Winny Shen, an associate professor at Schulich School of Business who studies inclusion in the workplace, worries that, coming out of the pandemic, there might also be a tendency for companies to tighten the purse strings in general and ask existing staff to do more instead of rehiring.

The RBC report also expresses concern about skills atrophying.

„The longer these women are out of the labour force, the greater the risk of skills erosion, which could potentially hamper their ability to get rehired or to transition to different roles as the economy evolves,” said Dawn Desjardins, one of the authors of the RBC report.

The RBC report shows that the job losses are worse for members of certain demographic groups, too. Mothers, visible minorities, young people and new immigrants are all disproportionately impacted.