Women ‘hit hardest’ by job losses in pandemic
MANY more women face losing their jobs than men here due to Covid-19 and the impact on females has been greater due to major issues such as childcare, it’s been warned.
Roseann Kelly, chief executive of Women in Business, said it “will be mostly women that are losing their jobs” in Northern Ireland as sectors such as customer-facing retail and hospitality face significant cuts here amid pandemic pressures.
And she says female entrepreneurs are suffering badly as a result of the crisis, with childcare issues becoming the biggest barrier for businesses.
“It will be mostly women that are losing their jobs,” she told the Ulster Business Podcast with Bank of Ireland.
“I feel that the impact is mostly being felt by women. Look at retail, the customer service end is going and growth is in the deliveries, which predominately go to males. Women are going to lose their jobs in retail and hospitality.
“Some of the creche facilities… I know of one which is not going to reopen. The margins are very tight in that industry and therefore the pay is quite low, so it’s very difficult.”
And she says there must be a new strategy to deal with childcare to ensure women are able to progress within their careers and help shift the balance of the volume of top jobs being held by men.
“The biggest issue for our corporate senior manages or entrepreneurs is childcare,” she said.
“Childcare is a huge issue and it does fall predominately on women, and it shouldn’t be a female issue in this day and age.
“We have had members furloughed who have had to take on schooling of children, and issues with that. That is key and the biggest issue we have. Even prior to Covid-19... we haven’t got a childcare strategy in place. It is key for women’s development.”
Roseann said a recent survey pointed to a large proportion of discrimination cases around the issue of childcare.
“That was expecting people to work from home while they have children there and the pressure that brought, or they were asking people to come back in to work when they had no childcare,” she said.
“There have been a lot of issues around that and it has to be addressed.
“Childcare was always a barrier. When this came about it was like, this is great, as employers can see that it can be done, and so I would have been excited about that. I still am.”
She said there’s also now an opportunity for some of Northern Ireland’s firms to help address the low number of females in charge of our biggest businesses. “It’s disappointing that just so few Top 100 business leaders are female,” she said.
“It doesn’t reflect the talent of the businesswomen that we have here, at all.
“When we first went into lockdown, and there was a realisation that we could work from home, that was a time for me to think ‘something positive is going to come out of this in terms of women’.
“The reason we only have a couple of women in the Top 100 is because the pipeline is not there. When we’ve lost those other women (in top jobs) there hasn’t been the quantity of women at senior management level.
“If we can sort out the childcare and flexibility that will take out a lot of the issues that are there. Then after that it’s about tapping in to that unconscious bias.”
You can listen to the full podcast at www.ulsterbusiness.com