The Covid-19 crisis is not just a healthcare crisis; it is now evident that it revealed many social, economic and development vulnerabilities. How institutions perform under a crisis is the real test of their effectiveness. As lockdowns were imposed and the economies shrunk, the first ones to be pushed to margins were those employed in the service sectors, as the International Labour Organization (ILO) research shows. This report also estimates that relative employment losses were higher for women than men.
The world witnessed an economic downturn in 2008. It is noteworthy that during the global recession of 2008, men faced more job losses than women, as the Massachusetts based National Bureau of Economic Research mention in their working paper from April 2020. This was so because during the pandemic related lockdowns, the sectors that have been impacted are those which tend to employ more women. The fact that schools had to be shut down too implied more requirements for childcare. This also led to women dropping out of the formal workforce.
Women who are a part of the paid professions have been found to be engaged in occupations that are considered “low-skilled”. These are mostly care or other service providing jobs. Other barriers that keep women disproportionately engaged in the paid workforce are unequal salaries or glass ceilings. Many countries also lag behind in providing a good legal architecture to address the social vulnerabilities that women face. Due to these existing discriminations, women were the first ones to be impacted as the Covid-19 pandemic crisis began to hit the world.
As the crisis worsened by mid-2020, it also began to impact men. “Overall, the volume of international trade in goods dropped by a dramatic 16% in the second quarter of 2020 compared with the same period of 2019”, to quote the data from the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). As global trade began to show the impacts of the slowdown caused by decreased economic activity, sectors that employ more men also began to be affected. At the same time, as countries where the health crisis was under control, service sectors began to open up, bringing women back to their jobs. But the overall impact on women’s jobs was still higher; as the UNTAD research further found.
To sum it up in numbers
At the global level, the employment loss for women stands at 5.0 per cent in 2020, versus 3.9 per cent for men. In absolute numbers, the loss is larger for men (80 million) than for women (64 million) because of the long‑standing gender gap in labour force participation rates. Across all regions, women have been more likely than men to become economically inactive, that is to drop out of the labour force, during this crisis. ILO
Taking into account these factors, it is estimated that women were disproportionately impacted by the Covid-19 induced economic slowdowns. It is also suggested that women who had to drop out of the workforce may find it harder to return to their jobs- both because of push and pull factors. As we begin to strategies recovery from this slowdown, we need to accommodate the impact it has had on women’s participation in the paid workforce globally. The post-Covid economic development needs a policy push to help women back into the workforce.