Women’s War with COVID-19: The disproportionate impact of the pandemic on Gender

Introduction

In March 2020, Covid-19 entered a world struggling with serious concerns of gender inequality and contributed substantially to making the socio-economic situations worse. Several reform efforts got submerged under emergency measures necessary to tackle the virus and contain the health situation, often biased against women’s distinct needs. While the closure of schools meant end of education for many women in developing countries, pause on peacekeeping efforts in conflict or violent struck zones also had serious implications, especially for vulnerable women in these regions. On the surface it may seem like a simple gender reform and development issue, but the crisis permeates deeper. As Crenshaw highlights in one of her most influential works on intersectionality[1], the issue of gender is multi-layered and intersects with race and class. Policies implemented as a means to repair the damage quickly, especially economic damage with a potential for global recession, often deems it necessary to overlook the (assumed insignificant) crevices of intra-group differences in women. A generalised policy cannot be expected to work efficiently for all women across all races and ethnicity, given the massive differences in their structural, political and economic backgrounds, and global recovery policies in the aftermath of COVID-19 urgently need to recognise this. The impact that COVID-19 has had on women is complex and multi layered and reconstruction will need to catch up. Ignoring the differences between any group in society, let alone an entire gender can contribute to tensions within and outside that group. This paper attempts to analyse and explore these differences in impacts of COVID-19, faced by different women, differently. The first section will look at the areas women were adversely affected in comparison to men and try to assess the toll of this on international economy. The next section will explore the micro-rules that further limit women’s development in adverse situations.

Areas women were worst affected

Evidence suggests that the COVID-19 pandemic's consequences extended well beyond the disease itself. It has exacerbated existing inequalities between women and men and between different sects of women, in almost all aspects of life. Before the pandemic hit, women had already faced a 99-year long wait before they were expected to enjoy full equality with men. The effects of COVID-19 have increased the wait by almost 40 years to 136, according to estimates by the World Economic Forum. UNCTAD Secretary-General Rebeca Grynspan recently said at their forum opening[2] that today the world is looking at not one but at least 4 decades worth of loss to gender equality, in the wake of COVID, and unless we solve these inequalities, the pursuit of the SDGs is unimaginable. The revival of global economy and overall development of society which is often pursued as a separate initiative from women empowerment but are actually intertwined—without one the other cannot be fully achieved. Following are some areas in the socio-economic sphere where women have been impacted the hardest historically, which has now been further aggravated by the effects of the pandemic:

Frontline care-givers

During the pandemic, the fact that most caregivers in the health industry were women, substantially increased their chances of getting infected.  Women were on the front lines of providing healthcare to patients, making up the significant proportion of healthcare workers, and accounted for 72% of all COVID-19 cases among healthcare professionals in the USA, alone[3]. It may have been possible to avert this situation if women were safeguarded from the beginning and were able to work sensible shifts like most male health care workers do. However, the unique situations of women (often single mothers) and women of colour from poor households were never considered before the pandemic has resulted in further deterioration of their conditions.

Unpaid care work

As lockdowns stalled the economic system, unpaid care work increased dramatically. Because of safety measures in place, more individuals stayed at home than ever before, increasing the need for household work and care. Oxfam research[4] shows that before the pandemic, women and girls spent 12.5 billion hours every day on unpaid care work. Now with increased  lockdowns, hospitalizations, school and college closures this burden is significantly exacerbated which is borne mostly by single mothers,  or women from poor and racially or ethnically marginalized communities. Furthermore, data from 38 countries show that, while the unpaid responsibilities have increased for both men and women, women continue to do the greater share. Women are also performing more intense care-related duties than men. Meanwhile, daughters are more helpful to parents than sons. As a result of this additional added work load,  more women are unable to retain their formal employments and are either quitting or being laid off.[5]

Employment layoffs

Women earned the right to work after years of struggle with political systems across the world. However, the benefits of that long incessant struggle had barely started to surface when they coincided with COVID-19. Before the lockdowns pushed unemployment rates surging and countless jobs disappearing, millions of women were already sustaining themselves and their children on poor incomes. Needless to say,  disruptions to childcare centers, schools, colleges and extra - curricular afterschool programs have been difficult for working fathers as well, but research shows that working mothers have taken on more of the resulting childcare responsibilities, and are more frequently reducing their hours or leaving their jobs in response. On top of this, there are inherent discriminations against women in the labour market especially and when it comes time to downsize, women are more often than not, seen as liabilities that must be let gone first.

Physical and mental health worsened as domestic violence and abuse soars

It comes as no surprise that amidst all this, women’s mental and physical health took a toll, further reducing her productivity as an able, contributing member of the economy’s work force. Across the world, reports of domestic violence and increased abuse of women and girls rocketed. With people spending more time, locked up inside their homes and often with the frustrations that comes with a health crisis like a pandemic, the situation for women only got worse. In developing countries especially, the lack of agency and independence for women resulted in many of them being trapped in cycles of violence with no access to help from outside.

Education: drop-out rates

It is a well-known fact which can be corroborated by multiple researches conducted on the subject that in many developing countries, the girls dropped out in big numbers in rural areas. The limited access to technology during remote, online education meant that boys were preferred to study and girls were either married off or sent to work to earn. The fight for on women’s education has been raging on for years but things took a steep turn with loss of jobs and futures of large families hung in confusion. In such a situation, with no special attention to policy that could prevent girls dropping out by way of reward, incentive or punishment, the drop- out rates kept increasing unchecked. This will soon show on a larger scale when there will be even fewer proportion of educated working women in the economy.

Micro norms, Intersectionality and COVID

Covid-19 is more than a public health or economic emergency. It is a discrimination crisis caused by life experience of race, gender, and class, worsened by competitiveness and poor access to resources. While liberalism and free markets have given people a lot of opportunities and greatly enhanced their lifestyle, it has downsides too. Besides the negative consequences of globalisation such as sweat shop conditions and exploitations we usually see being addressed, there is another serious issue which is given dangerously scant attention: intersectional challenges of women and micro norms[6] in the society that make resources inaccessible to them. Public and private spheres in the society grew thanks to liberalism. These spheres were premised on the protection of choices but as many feminist critiques of liberalism have questioned—whose choices are being protected in the demarcation of these spheres? The answer is clear if one looks at the state of family planning or women’s sexual health and reproductive rights. Policies that guarantee empowerment to women and generalise the unique differences of diverse women under one bracket, doesn’t take into account informal rules or micro norms that differentiate not just women from men but also women from women.

An Indian-American woman who is a naturalised citizen may have faced racism and have had to jump extra hoops for basic rights in America and will thus have very different lived experiences from a native white woman, but her experiences will also greatly differ from an Indian woman on a student visa who is in legal language ‘an alien’ in a foreign land with some rights but not enough. Even if their work place is the same and their company guarantees equal rights to all three women, the access to most resources will be different for the white woman, the Indian-American and the student given their legal statuses and financial backgrounds. They may all be equally qualified for a promotion but the student may have less hours of work permitted, putting her at a disadvantage from others. Based on a report by Brookings in an analysis of 2018 American Community Survey data, pre-COVID, nearly half of all working women—46% worked in jobs paying low wages, with average earnings of barely $10.93 per hour. As expected, the share of workers earning low wages is higher among Black women (54%) and Hispanic or Latina women (64%) than among white women (40%), reflecting the structural racism that has limited options in education, housing, and employment for people of color . In promoting a merely formal equality, liberalism fails to deliver substantive equality of power and its association with a market economy ultimately paralyzes its best efforts in this direction, and offers no plausible solution to the organizing critical issues of different women with unique identities and unique situations.

Now, with COVID-19 in the mix, the lack of attention on this key issue can result in all efforts to recover economies and further development, being futile. Therefore, in order to fix the mess worsened by the pandemic, we might need to take a step back and evaluate the complexity of issues in feminism. The relationship between political and economic liberalism and women’s rights is a key objection relevant today.

Conclusion

Stephanie Oueda Cruz, head of gender, diversity and inclusion at IDB Invest, Inter-American Development Bank, said in a recent interview that if women are not part of the workforce, that will have a ripple effect in the whole economy, the whole society which could mean a 14% hit to economic growth in Latin America and the Caribbean in the next three decades.[7]

Governments, businesses, and financiers must do more to counteract the COVID-19 pandemic's damage to gender equality and to secure some of the crisis's glimmers of hope for women. There is no doubt that women have been struck harder than men by rising unemployment caused by the pandemic, and their poverty levels are expected to recover more slowly as they continue to conduct more unpaid care labor, according to the International Labour Organization (ILO).

[1] Crenshaw, K. (1991). Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color. Stanford Law Review, 43(6), 1241–1299. https://doi.org/10.2307/1229039

[2] United Nations Conference on Trade and Development. (2021). ‘COVID-19 threatens four ‘lost decades’ for gender equality’ retrieved from https://unctad.org/news/covid-19-threatens-four-lost-decades-gender-equality

[3] Pan American Health Organisation. (2022). ‘Gender and Health Analysis: COVID-19 in the Americas’ Retrieved from https://www.paho.org/en/news/8-3-2022-covid-19-pandemic-disproportionately-affected-women-americas

[4] Oxfam International (2022) ‘5 ways women and girls have been the hardest hit by Covid-19’ Retrieved from https://www.oxfam.org/en/5-ways-women-and-girls-have-been-hardest-hit-covid-19

[5] UN Women. (2020). ‘Whose time to care: Unpaid care and domestic work during COVID-19?’ Gender and COVID-19 Brief. Retrieved from https://data.unwomen.org/publications/whose-time-care-unpaid-care-and-domestic-work-during-covid-19

[6] Haase, D. (2012). Revolution, Interrupted: Gender and Microfinance in Nicaragua. Critical Sociology, 38(2), 221–240. https://doi.org/10.1177/0896920511404443

[7] World Economic Forum. (2021). ‘'One step forward, 3 steps back': Gender equality and COVID-19’. Retrieved from https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/12/gender-equality-covid-19-pay-gap