Coronavirus worse for women
Five million people have their fingers, legs and toes crossed for a return to the semi-nirvana that was Covid-19 level 3 restrictions. If that’s what we hear tomorrow, queues for drive-through takeaways will be epic.
You may be able to get your mitts on some secret-recipe chicken. You may be able to hunt down a decent takeaway flat white. But level 3, if it even happens, is no return to normal.
There is no going back to the life we had. The way we work, interact, travel, socialise, the jobs we do, and how we support those who don’t have jobs anymore, will have changed. That’s a massive concept to wrap your noggin around.
Sectors of industry who’ve clung to accepted norms for decades are now spending their time (virtually) huddling together with a blank page headed ‘‘the future’’ on the table. If they’re smart, they’ll recognise the opportunity and we’ll end up with a better, stronger and fairer society; but it’ll take acknowledgement of some uncomfortable facts first.
One of those is that women are the big losers in this equation. And yes, I do mean right now and right at the coalface.
Early indications are that Covid-19 kills more men than women. Given our knowledge about the virus, how it spreads and what effects it leaves behind on the human body is in its mewling infancy right now, that may or may not become an established trend.
But those exposed to the virus in the course of their work – 70 per cent of workers in healthcare and social care in more than 100 countries analysed by the World Health Organisation – are women. And the further you look out at the ripples created by Covid-19, the grimmer it gets.
A policy brief released by UN secretary general Anto´ nio Guterres spells it out; nearly 60 per cent of women work in the ‘‘informal economy’’ in sectors where they earn less, and can save less. While men’s jobs have disappeared too, women are much closer to the poverty cliff.
On top of that, the unpaid work women do has exploded exponentially since distancing measures began. Children at home means school work must be taught, or supervised. The demands for care and support of older people, whether in your bubble or not, have increased.
An International Labour Organisation report shows women do 76 per cent of all unpaid care work, more than three-times as much as men. In Asia and the Pacific, it’s 80 per cent. These currents are combining as never before to defeat women’s rights and deny women’s opportunities, the UN report shows.
‘‘Progress lost takes years to regain. Teenage girls out of school may never return. I urge governments to put women and girls at the centre of their efforts to recover from Covid-19,’’ says Guterres.
This is likely to be more than uncomfortable for some, who will scream bloody murder at the idea that a global pandemic has a gender argument tagged to it. The risk is that the opposite will happen; that we shy away from truly innovative and balanced thinking because the crisis itself blinds us to the opportunity. The danger is that the (smallish) gains made for women and girls in the past decades will be lost, and the opportunities to do more tossed aside as an irrelevance. Pre-pandemic, much of the pushback against bringing more women into leadership roles, or paying them more equally, was based on the idea that encouragement is a better tool than compulsion. Carrot better than stick, yada yada. That our biggest companies are nowhere near achieving gender balance on their boards, and some won’t even discuss it, shows that’s a load of horse manure.
Well, now none of that matters. There’s no need to worry about going easy to avoid upsetting the apple cart. If the apples are already rolling down the road, it follows the cart can be re-stacked in a new formation.
Unfortunately, we’re already seeing opportunities missed. Auckland Council’s shiny new Mayoral Business Advisory Council, formed to assist the city’s transition to normality, has eight members. Only two are women, and none specifically represent iwi or Ma¯ ori more generally, or Pasifika, Asian, entrepreneurs, youth or other groups who have a stake rebuilding the business sector.
This despite the bleeding obvious; Ma¯ ori, Pasifika and people in other cultures who live in large wha¯ nau and care for older relatives, will be disproportionately affected. Their contributions, and their needs (which include flexible working hours and increased representation in better-paid jobs) could be baked into the recovery plans by any truly visionary response.
National Advisory Council on the Employment of Women member Theresa Gattung puts it like this: ‘‘Concepts like ‘diversity’ are easily seen as superfluous when a business’s survival is at stake. But this crisis is an opportunity for NZ to embrace what we truly value when life returns closer to normal.
‘‘Is this one of them? Or have we in Corporate NZ, just been paying lip service to it?’’
Alison Mau is a member of the National Advisory Council on the Employment of Women