For women, coronavirus economy is a devastating setback
VIRUS EXACERBATE INEQUALITIES, THREATENS GAINS MADE AT WORKPLACE
Over and over, Seema Munda kept refusing her parents’ pleas to get married. She wanted to be a nurse, not a housewife — and why was employment all right for her brother but not her?
So last summer, Munda lied about where she was going and slipped out of her conservative village in northern India. She travelled 1,600 kilometres south, to the city of Bengaluru, where she found work stitching shirts at a factory. “This job liberated me,” she said.
But when the coronavirus pandemic hit, Munda’s life of independence shattered. In March, India instituted one of the strictest lockdowns in the world. In April, more than 120 million Indians lost their jobs, including Munda, 21.
As the world takes stock of staggering losses from the coronavirus, economists predict especially dire setbacks for women in the workforce. The United Nations warned in a recent report that the pandemic has not only exacerbated inequalities between the sexes but threatened to undo decades of gains in the workplace. The International Labour Organisation found that 41 per cent of women were employed in sectors at high risk for job or working-hour losses from the pandemic, compared with 35 per cent of men.
The global slowdown could have especially stark consequences in developing economies, where around 70 per cent of working women are employed in the informal economy with few protections.
After Ebola quarantine measures were lifted in West Africa, for instance, women were slower than men to recover
The International Labour Organisation found that 41 per cent of women were employed in sectors at high risk for job or working hour losses from the pandemic.
their livelihoods and had a harder time securing loans to rebuild businesses.
In India, a nation of 1.3 billion, the coronavirus lockdown, which was imposed in late March, has only added to the setbacks for women, who were already being shaken out of the workforce in greater numbers in recent years.
One national employment study conducted in May found that a higher proportion of women reported losing their jobs
than men. Among Indians who remained employed, women were more likely to report anxiety about their futures.
Rohini Pande, an economics professor at Yale who researches women’s employment patterns in India, said female migrant workers could face steep challenges recovering work. Many women struggle to persuade their parents to let them defer marriage and leave their villages for jobs.
“The pipeline was already extremely leaky,” said Pande, who directs the Economic Growth Centre at Yale. “It’s just going to get leakier.”
Employment figures for India’s women have been a cause of concern for years.
From 2005 to 2018, female labour participation in India declined to 21 per cent from about 32 per cent, one of the lowest rates in the world. The rate for men also fell — India is experiencing a youth boom and has not been able to create enough new jobs to keep up — but not nearly as far as for women.
Economists have offered several explanations for the slide, including a cultural one: As India’s economy expanded, families that could afford to keep women at home did so, thinking it afforded them a degree of social status.
Domestic duties cut into the time women can search for jobs. In India, women perform 9.6 times more unpaid care work than men, about three times the global average. The pandemic has increased that burden for many women, according to the International Labour Organisation.