New normal brings new hurdles? Working women are left behind during the pandemic.

What does a typical working day appear like for a working mother with young children during a pandemic? “I just want my sleep back,” is Noor’s response. Currently working from home due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Noor balances working at an education non-profit, alongside handling domestic chores and helping her children, both under the age of 10 years, with their school assignments online. In the evenings, when she’d usually get back home from a busy day to enjoy the company of her family, she now spends catching up on work instead. She is grateful that her husband has finally begun contributing to housework, but he also seems stressed and disinterested after having receiving a pay-cut at his job. As a result, Noor’s days begin at 4am and end at 11pm, with little or no time for her to focus on the job or her own needs.

Labour economists have come to refer to Noor’s typical working day during the lockdown as a ‘double-double shift,’ where working women are finding their new set-ups to be even more stressful, despite flexibility of work hours and the ability to spend more time with loved ones while pursuing a career. However, the pandemic has also exposed how our communities, families and economies are founded on the backbones of unpaid and invisiblised domestic work. Suddenly, in many homes, the fathers, husbands and sons are finally becoming aware of how dreadful it is to do the dishes every few hours!

“Bring boys into the kitchen…only then can women step out”

There is a deep link between the gender gap in unpaid labour and a low female labour force participation (FLFP). In India itself, there has been an astonishingly worrying drop in women entering the workforce in the last 15 years, with the current rate hovering around a dismal 27%. When considered in a global context, India is only one rank above Saudi Arabia amongst the G-20 countries.

Source: World Bank, 2015 (Precarious Drop- Reassessing Patterns in Female Labour force Participation in India)

Indian women also engage the most time in unpaid domestic work and care work globally, barring only Kazakhstan, spending a staggering 577% more in minutes than men inside the house! How do we then work towards providing women the options to seek paid labour when in reality most women in the country have no option but to prioritise their home-based duties? Reputed journalist Namita Bhandare proposes a fascinatingly direct solution to this complex problem, “Once you bring more boys inside the home and inside the kitchen, only then can women step out to work.”

Men are taking more responsibility within the home, but the workload for women continues to rise:

Ever since India entered into a strict lockdown in March 2020, these traditional gender roles have been put to the test in homes. Working women from different economic classes are facing the challenge of juggling their various roles as mothers/daughters/wives alongside income earners, in the hopes of returning to work outside their homes, where they otherwise sought relief from their home-bound roles. An important question to consider at this juncture is- Has COVID-19 provided an opportunity to transform how families and societies run or has it only further cemented existing gender roles and expectations?

Early findings from the few preliminary studies that have been carried out imply that the results are ambivalent and indicative of a positive change, at best. One study conducted at Ashoka University reveals how men are getting more involved in housework, resulting in the gender gap decreasing in average hours across most states in the country.

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However, while men were contributing at least one hour more in domestic chores, women invariably ended up spending as much as 25% more time on housework. This is evidently because of how the social support systems that a working woman so heavily relied on to enable her to work outside her home, have all suddenly become defunct. All at once, she becomes a substitute for the domestic help, the teacher, the cook, the grandparents that could share childcaring responsibilities and lastly, as it often is, the paid employee.

Throughout history during periods of crisis, gender roles and behavioural changes occur when the traditional expectations which are enforced on women, seem to come to the fore. This is very true especially right now when women are once again confined to their homes, as it has resulted in an increasing expectation that they prioritise housework over paid work. Similar findings have been recorded by researchers in USA and UK, where despite improved distribution in unpaid domestic work, the workload for women has only continued to increase.

Economic impacts of lockdown are not gender-neutral:

In 2020, millions of women across the world have been dealt pay cuts, laid off or face uncertainty about their future employment status because of the nature of the sectors that employ them. Sectors like tourism, hospitality and beauty that are dominated by women workers, have become completely defunct, where the now normal ‘work from home’ remains inapplicable. More women have been laid off or faced pay-cuts compared to their male counterparts because by default they are disproportionately hired in more insecure industries, making them more vulnerable to economic shock.

The research from Ashoka University also makes this point clear, indicating that women are 20% less likely to return to their jobs in a post-lockdown economy, perhaps because their employers cannot afford to hire them back or because they fully have returned to playing the traditional roles relegated to women inside homes as mothers or caregivers, making it a lot more difficult to reassert their agency beyond these identities.

There are multiple recommendations in the form of structural policies as well as organisational changes that have been provided by the UN and other organisations such as Oxfam International. Most importantly, we need to recognise that everyone becomes a stakeholder in strengthening the employment status of women to withstand unemployment and job loss in times of crisis. Empowering women requires more men to take up responsibility in sharing domestic work, more leaders and employers to actively create flexible working environments for female employers and more public investment to ensure that women enjoy security in their careers even in times of uncertainty.