Unemployment in the aftermath of Covid -19

Covid-19 laid bare the inequities that exist in our society, whether it is gender, race or riches, and really showed how interconnected we all are...

As organizations make their plans to reopen offices, and the job market hopefully starts to recover, some things to consider →

It is predicted that the COVID-19 crisis is disproportionately affecting women workers in many ways (particularly owing to the impact of the downturn on the hospitality, retail and service sector). There is a risk of losing some of the gains made in recent decades and exacerbating gender inequalities in the labour market. 

Working mothers are enduring additional pressure during stay-at-home orders. They’re spending 15 more hours weekly on domestic labor than men, according to business strategy advisers Boston Consulting Group. 

With looming concerns about whether schools will reopen before offices, parents worry they may have to choose between their jobs and their families. That scenario could have a bigger impact on working women, who have taken on the greater share of home-schooling and child care.

Previous crises have shown that when women lose their jobs, their engagement in unpaid care work increases, and that when jobs are scarce, women are often denied job opportunities available to men. The bigger their losses in employment during the lockdown phase and the greater the scarcity of jobs in the aftermath of the COVID-19 crisis, the harder it will be for women’s employment to recover. 

There’s a big financial impact and compounding factor when you actually step out of the workforce. Women who decide to leave the workforce, temporarily or permanently, for child-care reasons are mid-career at the point where they should be moving into leadership roles - we’re going to continue to see those gaps in leadership pipelines in the long term.