Covid heroines, not victims
‘Combining job, childcare and housework’
‘Women are asking if it is worth their while’
‘Absence was keenly felt in many young families’
The pandemic toll on women has been dreadful, but if we cast those who battled long hours on the frontline, or fought at home to keep families af loat, solely as the injured party, do we not dishonour their heroism and sacrif ice rather than elevating their tireless service to its rightful status?
THE high price paid by women in both their personal and professional lives is one of the pandemic’s most dominant narratives. Many public thinkers on the global stage, like Melinda Gates, Dr Anthony Fauci, chief medical adviser to the US Government, and even Meghan Markle have pointed out how the health crisis has exposed, and indeed amplified, the fault lines in society and – when it comes to gender – has disproportionately affected women’s lives and livelihoods. According to the UN deputy secretary general Amina Mohammed, the toll of Covid-19 could ‘set women’s rights back by decades’.
In this country, the National Women’s Council (NWCI) as well as policy units in organisations such as IBEC, the National Economic and Social Council and MEP Frances Fitzgerald, highlight how the pandemic has turned back the clock on equality, reviving the 1950s stereotype of the harried housewife, the default parent of her offspring who also shoulders the burden of care for her elderly parents all the while juggling her career.
‘The pandemic continues to have a differential effect on women and men… Women have been more vulnerable to domestic violence and the socioeconomic consequences of the lockdowns. Women are more likely to be on the frontline as healthcare workers and are more likely when working from home to be combining their job, childcare and housework,’ said Ms Fitzgerald, whose report on the gender perspective of the Covid-19 crisis calling for measures to protect women’s rights was adopted in January by a large majority of the European Parliament.
NWCI director Orla O’Connor, says the threat to equality emanates from the expectation that women will perform the bulk of unpaid caring work over their lifetimes. ‘The restrictions imposed as a result of the pandemic have exposed a deep structural inequality of care in our society, where women in Ireland continue to provide the vast majority of care for infants, schoolgoing children and then the elderly,’ she explains.
But running parallel to these grim predictions of gaping inequality and disadvantage there is another narrative – one that is seldom heard and never celebrated – of quiet female heroism and altruism, displayed as the so-called ‘fairer sex’ put its collective shoulder to the wheel and carried the country through one of the greatest upheavals in modern times.
True, it may have been mostly men who steered the country through the health crisis as decision-makers on NPHET and in Cabinet. But at the other end of the social scale, the risky, thankless drudgery of sitting at checkouts in shops and supermarkets, literally helping feed the nation, during the first and most extreme lockdown of the pandemic fell mostly to women.
And it was women predominantly who staffed the nursing homes, arguably the most tragic scenes of the pandemic, owing to their startling lack of preparedness for the lethal effects of Covid-19 on frail old people in communal living arrangements, despite the heartbreaking evidence from their counterparts in Italy.
Nurses held the hands of the elderly, most of them women, as they took their last breaths separated from their nearest and dearest; they experienced episodes of unbearable human anguish that will mark them for the rest of their lives.
As the doors of nursing homes were sealed tight against the world while a cruel infection raged through it, nurses often fell ill like dominos for want of adequate PPE and suffered disproportionately from long Covid. In a single month, January 2021, 1,209 female nursing home staff fell ill from the disease.
In hospital emergency rooms, nurses tended to patients who fought for their lives on ventilators and kept the skeleton of nonCovid related health services ticking over.
At the top of the medical science tree, there were key female players. Professor Teresa Lambe, member of the Oxford group of scientists who developed the AstraZeneca jab; Emer Cooke, head of the European Medicines Agency and Professor Karina Butler, chair of the National Immunisation Advisory Committee.
On the homefront and in the community, research shows that it was mostly women who took up the slack as unpaid carers of elderly relatives or friends when day services were put on ice and social distancing forced friendship and support groups apart. The Employment and Life Effects of Covid survey in May 2020 by the Central Statistics Office showed that more women (21%) than men (15%) were caring for a dependent family or friend because of the crisis.
Women also stepped up to the plate when nurseries and childcare facilities, schools and sports clubs closed down, juggling childcare and home-schooling, often with their careers. According to a survey from
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the National Women’s Council, 71.5% of women were providing care for children, adults or both in their home. In another study of homeschooling, 73% of parents of both primary and secondary school students said that the child’s mother or female guardian was the primary support for the child.
Small wonder that surveys show a marked preference among female employees to return to the office compared to men, who opt in larger numbers for a hybrid form of working. A CSO survey, Office, shows that men are more likely to report wanting a mixture of working from home and at their place of work (60.9%) compared to only 43.9% of females.
Research data by McKinsey Global Institute shows that among working mothers of children under 10 years of age, the rate at which they considered leaving their jobs during Covid was 10 percentage points higher than for men. Orla O’Connor of the NWCI says that many women are reappraising their work-life balance now. ‘Women are asking if it is really worth their while being in paid employment that entails paying sky-high rates for childcare and still having to do all the housework,’ she said.
‘Covid highlighted the need for affordable public childcare and how its absence puts parents in the position of having to depend on informal arrangements, like grandparents, to help out. When the over-70s were cocooning, their absence was keenly felt in many young families.’
As society and the economy closed down to halt the spread of the disease, families fell back on their resources for survival but all too often that meant the resilience and dedication of its womenfolk.
Yet the work they undertook, like that carried out by most essential workers, and indeed carers, is not considered impressive, either by men or, indeed, the women who mostly do it. The paltry pay of nursery assistants and home car