How has Covid-19 impacted gender equality in the workforce?

In 2015, the United Nations (UN), in order to address social ills including poverty and conflict, aimed to achieve gender equality by the year 2030. Even though significant progress has been made in narrowing the labour force participation rate across genders, the gap still stood to be 27 percentage points in 2019. In the wake of the Covid-19 crisis, the economic downturn has substantial implications for gender equality in terms of employment, with the outlook for women being nothing short of devastating. Female gains made in the labour market in the past are threatened to be nullified due to Covid-19, with this gap expected to widen in the future.

According to the International Labour Organisation (ILO), this deadly virus possesses the ability to wipe out “modest progress” made on gender equality at work in the recent past, with women being more at risk of losing their jobs. They are also more likely to be exposed to infection and to undertake a higher burden of unpaid care. The ILO has increased its estimate of the loss of global working hours by 14% in the second quarter of 2020 as compared to the last quarter of 2019. This is roughly equivalent to the loss of 400 million full-time jobs.

In the optimistic scenario, projections made by the ILO reveal that job losses would be limited to 1.2% in the fourth quarter of 2020 as compared to a year earlier, indicative of 34 million jobs lost. On the other hand, if a second wave of infection is experienced, working hours are estimated to be reduced by 12% which would mean a loss of 340 million full-time jobs.

Globally, 40% of all employed women, nearly 510 million, work in sectors that have been the hardest hit by the virus including hospitality, retail and entertainment. Across regions, the proportion of women working in such hard-hit sectors include 58.9% in Central America, 48.5% in South-East Asia, 45.8% in Southern Europe and 45.5% in South America. Moreover, women also constitute a vast majority of the 55m domestic workers who are more vulnerable to job losses and lack of adequate social security coverage as a result of global lockdown.

In developing countries, women are more likely to be employed in social and informal sectors as compared to men, thereby making them more susceptible to lower wages, reduced job security and declining social protection. Similarly, the skewed distribution of unpaid care work has also exacerbated during the pandemic, with most of the impact being driven from closure of schools and care services.

The Covid-19 pandemic is proving successful in reversing the hard-won gender equality gains made in the last few decades. In order to counter this, it is imperative that policymakers both draft and implement fiscal policies aimed at addressing gender equality so that more economic opportunities can be generated for women. Flexible working arrangements and provision of work from home schedules can help allow both genders to telework and better balance their professional and personal lives. A significant step that can help alleviate female work burden would be to promote men’s engagement in caregiving and household chores.

Furthermore, childcare can also be subsidised so that both female labour force participation can be stimulated and more jobs in the childcare sector created. This health crisis and the ensuing global lockdown can be taken as an opportunity to ‘unstereotype’ gender roles and encourage men to play a more active role within the household. In an ideal case scenario if women play a similar role to men in the labour market, it is expected that nearly $28 trillion could potentially be added to global annual GDP in 2025.