The Female Economy and Covid-19: Rhetoric, Feedback Loops and Intersectionality
By Karel Ohana
The way intersectionalities reveal themselves in societal transactions has resulted in COVID-19 incurring deep, albeit not unexpected losses to women. To cite Jenna Norman, the Public Affairs Officer at the UK Women’s Budget Group for the LSE’s blog “Like all emergencies,[COVID-19] collides with existing health and socio-economic inequalities which mean that although many people all over the world are now riding the same storm, they are doing so in very different boats.” Women’s economic marginalisation has been a fact of life; data from previous US recessions since 1949 reveal the 2020 recession “deviates most sharply from the historical norm in its disparate gender impact”.
Figure 1: Difference between rise in women’s and men’s unemployment, US recessions from 1948 to 2020 (author’s calculations based on data from the Bureau of Labour Statistics
As the UN Women website elucidates, economic crises hit women hardest because women tend to earn less and have fewer savings. To exacerbate this, women are disproportionately overrepresented in the informal economy, thus they have less access to social protection. In the 2008 financial crash for instance, the diversion of government funds toward relief efforts took a huge toll on women due to underspending in the public sector. Many migrant women today still cannot even claim social security under the ‘No Recourse to Public Funds’ condition stamped on many non-EU visas. The fact migrant workers have been the linchpin of the National Health Service, and other such ‘key worker’ occupations only highlights the inconsistency between our ostensibly ‘merit-based’ economy and our unjust reality.
Furthermore, the nature of work remains flagrantly gender specific: women and men are concentrated in different sectors both in mature and emerging economies. Therefore, causative, or symptomatic of this disparity (I presume the latter), societal norms have a significant bearing on women’s experience of COVID and its many consequences. For instance, in a powerful yet disheartening representation of the pervasive nature of antiquated rhetoric, the global World Values Survey, demonstrates that more than half the respondents in many countries in South Asia and MENA agreed that men have more right to a job than women when jobs are scarce. Approximately one in six respondents in developed countries thought the same. This may be why women are more likely to be burdened with unpaid care and domestic work, resulting in their leaving the labour force, sometimes indeterminately. Data from previous crises corroborates that increased unemployment impels people to revert to traditional gender roles. This testifies to the extent to which attitudes are seeped into the subconscious, or worse, to how these inform calculated measures predicated on the notion of women’s incapacity. Hence, in a downturn, unemployed men are favoured more heavily in the hiring process when jobs are scarce, whilst unemployed women take on more household care and work. It is important to understand this happens even in the most liberal of spaces. For instance, the coronavirus has seen prospects of women in academia, where progressive views outnumber conservative ones, plummet. Many attribute a lack of time to meet their deadline for tenure to an increased domestic load. In academic circles, obtaining tenure determines the rest of your career’s trajectory: your access to networks, a steady income, and notoriety. For mothers in up-or-out fields, the combination of loss of productivity and an increase in childcare is due to have dire implications. Because women make up the majority of single-parent households, they will have less access to shared assets and domestic work cannot be shared between two parents, thereby compounding the above.
As the UN Women website puts it pithily:
Women are bearing the brunt of economic and social fallout of Covid-19
Figure 2: McKinsey & Company’s model depicts the intersection of female-dominated industries and those impacted by the Coronavirus-induced recession. Women are overrepresented in many of the industries hardest hit by COVID-19, such as food service, retail and entertainment.
The intersectionalities of class, race, and gender mean that marginalized women will disproportionately have a higher risk of coronavirus transmission. For instance, disabled women have had their care standards relaxed by the Coronavirus Act 2020. Additionally, 70 percent of health workers and first responders worldwide are women, where Black, Asian, and Ethnic Minority women are as aforementioned, overrepresented. Beyond the evidence that this reality results in excess exposure to the virus for women, it also means women are at the relentless mercy of the rampant iniquity of the health sector, where the gender pay gap (28%) is higher than the overall gender pay gap. Indeed, as the economic onslaught incited by Covid-19 has revealed all too transparently, inequalities too are endemic. Sadly, the negative feedback loops stemming from economic insecurity will outlive the virus, as will the defining polarization, fear, and misery of this seemingly interminable epoch.
The economic phenomenon, Hysteresis, is an efficient framework to look at in observing the incumbent negative cycles of decline. It states that the longer the period of unemployment, the lower the chances of finding fresh employment.
The Covid-induced poverty spike is therefore due to widen the gender poverty gap: more women will be pushed into extreme poverty than men. We can look to the Ebola crisis to ascertain quarantines significantly reduce economic activity in the female economy, fuelling a rise in poverty and food insecurity. Where men’s economic activity rebounded quickly in the Ebola Crisis’ aftermath, women’s did not.
These realities are tragic for the individual, as well as for women of all walks of life as a monolithic group. The economic, social and political fallout from COVID-19 detracts from the strides we had made in reaching gender parity, subsequently minimising the congruousness of misogynistic tropes pertaining to women’s ‘profligacy’ in today’s society. Notwithstanding this, these realities also have tangible repercussions for society at large.
As McKinsey & Company state in their article COVID-19 and gender equality: Countering the regressive effects, “What is good for gender equality is good for the economy and society as well”. It is often said, for better or for worse, that business is microcosmic of societal operation; hence achieving gender equality in society, the report concludes, is contingent upon normalising gender equality in work. Oftentimes, I believe, talk of structural inequity towards women in work serves to reinforce the concept of women as other. In the most pragmatic sense though, “the fact that job losses are much higher for women not only matters for gender equality, but will also reduce families’ ability to offset income losses, producing a deeper and more persistent recession”. Moreover, the consequent shocks are propagated throughout the economy. The scope of propagation depends upon the degree of decrease in consumption demand, but fundamentally, the initial shock is amplified and propagated throughout the economy. Women count as productive workers; we are people too.
The report estimates that in the highly probable impending gender-regressive scenario in which women are left to wallow in their plight, global GDP growth could be $1 trillion lower in 2030 than it would be if women’s unemployment were to match that of men in each sector. They qualify that the impacts could be exacerbated should factors such as “increased childcare burdens, attitudinal bias, a slower recovery, or reduced public and private spending on services such as education or childcare make women leave the labour market permanently”. If we galvanise public opinion to take concrete action to mitigate against these tragedies, in both social and economic terms, we could add $13 trillion to global GDP in 2030 compared with the gender-regressive scenario.
The sum total of this is that regardless of your ideological propensity, or propensity to consume, you do have a stake in this, whether you are of the camp which seeks to optimise growth, or of the camp which strives for maximum societal cohesion.
Let us minimise the income disparity; let us subvert pernicious rhetoric; let us anchor the disparity in the boats we are navigating this tumult through.
Sources:
https://voxeu.org/article/shecession-she-recession-2020-causes-and-consequences
https://www.freemovement.org.uk/what-is-the-no-recourse-to-public-funds-condition/
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/29/business/economy/pandemic-women-tenure.html
https://www.unwomen.org/en/digital-library/publications/2020/09/gender-equality-in-the-wake-of-covid-19
https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/future-of-work/covid-19-and-gender-equality-countering-the-regressive-effects#