Government Employees’ Experience and Expectation of COVID-19 Hardships: The Moderating Role of Gender and Race in the United States

• Date: 01 January 2022
• Published date: 01 January 2022
• DOI: 10.1177/02750740211049280
• Subject Matter: Articles

Government Employees’Experience and

Expectation of COVID-19 Hardships: The

Moderating Role of Gender and Race in

the United States

JungHo Park

1,2

and Yongjin Ahn

3

Abstract

This article examines government employees’experience and expectation of socioeconomic hardships during the COVID-19

pandemic—employment income loss, housing instability, and food insufficiency—by focusing on the role of gender and race.

Employing the Household Pulse Survey, a nationally representative and near real-time pandemic data deployed by the U.S.

Census Bureau, we find that government employees were less affected by the pandemic than non-government employees

across socioeconomic hardships. However, female and racial minorities, when investigated within government employees,

have a worse experience and expectation of pandemic hardships than men and non-Hispanic Whites. Our findings suggest

a clear gender gap and racial disparities in the experience and expectation of pandemic hardships.

Keywords

coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, government employee, socioeconomic hardships, gender gaps, racial disparities,

Household Pulse Survey

Introduction

The world is in the crisis of coronavirus, initially reported in

Wuhan, Hubei Province, China on December 31, 2019. Over

the past year, the virus has affected nearly every country,

including the United States since its first confirmed case on

January 20, 2020. The World Health Organization (WHO)

declared the novel coronavirus disease a pandemic on

March 11, 2020, calling it COVID-19 (WHO, 2020). In the

next 2 days, a national emergency was declared in the

United States concerning the pandemic and Americans are

still in the middle of the public health crisis.

The sudden and unprecedented disruption by the pan-

demic has revealed the cracks in the U.S. public health

system (Tulenko & Vervoort, 2020) and thrown government

employees into a frenzy, forcing them to not only fight

against the spread of the virus but try to manage its accompa-

nying socioeconomic hardships (Ansell et al., 2020; UN,

2020). From frontline healthcare workers and public health

officials to teachers, sanitation workers, social welfare offi-

cers, and more, government employees have been thrust in

the spotlight, elevating awareness and understanding of the

crucial role they play in everyday life. Government employ-

ees have put their lives at risk to continue serving the public

throughout the pandemic. Unfortunately, many of them have

subsequently been infected and an alarming number have lost

their lives.

Beyond the self-sacrifice and extraordinary humanness

that government employees show in the workplace during

the COVID-19 pandemic, there is an unanswered question

of how government employees have fared in their own

lives. Early pandemic studies show mixed findings of

whether job security and other social and economic situations

are better for government employees than non-government

employees during the pandemic (Hinkley, 2020; Marcén &

Morales, 2020; UN, 2020; Zavattaro, 2020). Other studies

suggest that government employees may have more difficul-

ties in managing their socioeconomic hardships than others

because many of them are considered essential workers and

exposed to a higher risk of virus transmissions (Ansell

et al., 2020; O’Flynn, 2020).

1

SURE Education Research Group, Department of Smart City, Chung-Ang

University, Seoul, South Korea

2

Population Dynamics Research Group, Department of Urban Planning and

Spatial Analysis, Sol Price School of Public Policy, University of Southern

California, Los Angeles, CA, USA

3

Department of Public Policy and Management, Sol Price School of Public

Policy, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA

Corresponding Author:

YongjinAhn, Department of Public Policy and Management, Sol Price School

of Public Policy, University of Southern California, 650 Childs Way, Los

Angeles, CA 90089, USA.

Email: ahnyongj@usc.edu

Article

American Review of Public Administration

2022, Vol. 52(1) 15–35

© The Author(s) 2021

Article reuse guidelines:

sagepub.com/journals-permissions

DOI: 10.1177/02750740211049280

journals.sagepub.com/home/arp

Understanding government employees’experience and

expectation of the pandemic is very important and timely

for largely two reasons. First, the public sector has a historical

role in enhancing employment equity by providing job

opportunities to less-advantaged populations, and therefore

any efforts to staff public bureaucracies representative of

the public have been a key concern in the field of public man-

agement and administration (Llorens et al., 2008). That is

why scholars and researchers have continuously tackled

issues of gender and racial discrimination within the public

sector (Lee, 2020). Second, policy experts have highlighted

public sector compensation as an important public policy

issue (Guajardo, 2020). The issue has been politicized

among the public, while politicians have used the rhetoric

of government being oversized and inefficient and filled

with overcompensated employees, as an attempt to “bash”

the bureaucracy (Kaatz & Morris, 2000). For example,

former president Trump’s recent attempts to create a new

type of federal position, Schedule F (Executive Order

13,957), is in line with past government reforms (e.g., the

new public management) that introduce market-oriented pol-

icies and flexible employment strategies (Ingraham et al.,

2000). Social and political pressures to implement such gov-

ernance reforms burdened state/local governments with the

task of decreasing public employees’job security in the

name of performance accountability (Dubnick &

Frederickson, 2011; Schillemans, 2016). Public administra-

tion scholars claim that these reforms led to the demoraliza-

tion of government employees by raising emotional strain

and decreasing job security (Diefenbach, 2009). As a

result, research suggests that public sector wage equity and

the perceived job security are major drivers of government

employee turnover (Lee & Whitford, 2008; Selden &

Moynihan, 2000). Public sector employment condition also

heavily impacts on the quality of public services through

the path of employee morale issues. Therefore, it is worth

examining the degree to which government employees

were hit by the pandemic in comparison to non-government

employees, which has not been fully examined. It is also

unknown which population subgroups among government

employees, such as female (Alon et al., 2020; Galasso

et al., 2020) and racial minorities (Boulware, 2020; Evans,

2020; Galea & Abdalla, 2020), were hit harder than others

and in the most urgent need of assistance. Government

employees’perception and expectations about their socioe-

conomic well-being in the future, which is critical to ensure

continuity and resilience of public services, have not been

examined in the context of the current pandemic (Kaslow

et al., 2020).

To fill the gaps, we investigate experiences and expecta-

tions of socioeconomic hardships during the COVID-19 pan-

demic by using the Household Pulse Survey (HPS), a new

survey timely deployed by the U.S. Census Bureau to

provide near real-time data of how government employees

and non-government employees, and their household

members, have fared in terms of their socioeconomic condi-

tions throughout the pandemic. Based on the timely and

nationally representative data, we attempt to make three con-

tributions to the COVID-19 public management and admin-

istration scholarship. First, we identify possible associations

between the degree of socioeconomic hardships experienced

in the past weeks—consisting of income loss, housing insta-

bility, and food insufficiency—and government employee

status, controlling for other intervening factors, to see

whether government employees are worse or better off than

private employees and others. Second, we estimate the

extent to which government employee status plays a role in

explaining individual worker’s future expectations about

socioeconomic hardships. Third, we examine whether a

gender gap and racial disparities exist among government

employees in terms of their experiences and expectations of

pandemic hardships.

We first provide a brief review of the COVID-19 trend in

the United States, which is followed by a review of existing

research on public–private comparisons and the role of

gender and race in determining experiences and expecta-

tions of socioeconomic hardships, particularly in the

context of the current pandemic. From these discussions,

we derive a set of testable hypotheses about the experience

and expectation of pandemic hardships, and their possible

interactions with gender and race. Then, we describe how

we compiled the HPS data and statewide contextual varia-

bles known to be related to pandemic hardships. Using a

set of multilevel mixed-effect logistic models, we analyze

the associations between pandemic hardships and

individual-level demographic and socioeconomic charac-

teristics, with an emphasis on government employee

status, as well as state-level contextual variables. We

conclude by discussing the public management and admin-

istration implications of our key findings to improve public

service delivery and prepare the post-coronavirus era in the

United States.

Background and Hypotheses

Trend in the COVID-19 Spread in the United States

After the first COVID-19 case in the United States was con-

firmed on January 20, 2020, in Washington state, the corona-

virus spread to every state and the District of Columbia

within 2 months (U.S. CDC, 2020; see Figure 1). The

increasing capacity of COVID-19 testing entailed the initial

upsurge (also referred to as wave 1) of confirmed cases in

late March. Wave 2 starting in June continued through

early September, which was followed by wave 3, the sharpest

one, resulting in the cumulative count of 19,661,908 cases on

December 31, 2020. Our analytic period, as specified in

Figure 1, spans for the entire year of 2020 from April 23 to

December 21, except the end of the year and a month since

March 13 when the national emergency was declared.

16 American Review of Public Administration 52(1)