evidence: The rapid rise in women’s labor force participation was a major development in the labor market during the second half of the 20th century. Overall, women’s labor force participation increased dramatically from the 1960s through the 1980s, before slowing in the 1990s and early 2000s. Labor force participation among women then began a decline that accelerated in the wake of the December 2007–June 2009 recession, hitting a prepandemic low in 2015 at 56.7 percent. The rate then rose to 57.4 percent in 2019, before the pandemic affected the labor market. [...] Women’s labor force participation rate was 56.2 percent in 2020, 1.2 percentage points lower than the rate in 2019. Men’s labor force participation rate, which always has been much higher than that for women, also decreased in 2020; the rate for men was down by 1.5 percentage points to 67.7 percent. These declines in labor force participation reflect the impact of the pandemic on the labor market. (See table 2.)