On the day in April 2020 that Valerie Mekki lost her job, she was scared to share the bad news with her children. So she hid in her room for 45 minutes.

“I just didn’t want to face them,” says Mekki, who worked in fashion merchandising for more than 18 years and was the sole provider of health insurance for her family. “I had the shame and the guilt.”

But her teenagers surprised her with their optimism.

“They had seen me work so hard in the fashion industry. To them, it was like — you’re going to figure it out,” she says.

More than a year later, Mekki is still figuring it out. She is among millions of women who have yet to return to work full time, despite an economic recovery boosted by the availability of COVID-19 vaccines and falling rates of coronavirus infection.

Labor economists say it’s hard to point to any single reason why 2 million fewer women are in the labor force than before the coronavirus pandemic or why in a country that’s now facing labor shortages, so many women remain unemployed.

“I think it’s just a complex mix of factors,” says Stephanie Aaronson, a senior fellow with the Brookings Institution. “Some of those could start to subside as the economy recovers, and jobs come back, and schools reopen, and the health situation improves.”

But a return to pre-pandemic levels could take a long time, in part because women tend to stick with the decisions they’ve made. A mother who decided to stay home with her children in the pandemic may end up out of the workforce for years, Aaronson says. “So I think that the recovery for female labor force participation could just be slow.”

Katherine Gaines says finding work was never a problem for her before the pandemic. For more than 20 years, she worked as a legal assistant in Washington, D.C., handling deadline tasks for high-powered attorneys.

“Whatever they needed done, I was the go-to person,” she says. She even planned an attorney’s wedding once.

In January 2020, her law firm downsized, and she was laid off. She quickly applied to some temp agencies and got an assignment that ended at just about the time that the pandemic hit. Then the work dried up.

“Nobody had anything for me to go to,” she says.

It was a blessing in a way. She had recently moved in with her mother, who has Alzheimer’s disease. Taking care of her was a full-time job. She thought about looking for work outside the legal field but was afraid of catching COVID-19.

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“I knew I couldn’t work in retail, because I couldn’t be exposed and bring it home to my mother,” she says. “So I just had to just be hopeful. Sit and wait. I always say, ‘God didn’t bring me this far to drop me off.’ “

This year, Gaines moved her mother into a nursing home. Now she’s starting to apply for jobs again, but this time around, she’s being more selective. At 62, she doesn’t want to get back into what she calls “that crazy part” of the legal field — the long hours and intense deadlines.