Retail,accommodation and food services,and the healthcare sector employed 30 per cent of the nation's workers before the virus outbreak. Two-thirds of those workers were women.
The ABS found the retail,hospitality and healthcare sectors were being hit hard by efforts to curb the coronavirus.
In the healthcare sector,the ABS found while 9 per cent of employers had temporarily increased staff hours,44 per cent had cut them and 17 per cent had put staff on unpaid leave.
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Of the 1.8 million people employed in health and social services,almost 1.4 million are women.
Accommodation and food services employs 935,000 people,of whom 516,000 are women. Seventy per cent of these firms have cut work hours,43 per cent have put staff on unpaid leave and 29 per cent have workers on paid leave.
In the female-dominated retail sector,which employs 1.3 million people,there's been an 8 per cent lift in working hours. Most of those have been in supermarkets. But 37 per cent of businesses have cut staff hours,with 13 per cent of workers on unpaid leave.