Getting women back: what will it take?
“Would I have even had these bloody kids if I’d known what was coming?” a friend jokes at the park. “I gave them four years when they were small and it was fine, I expected it. But, just having re-started working, being forced back to being a housewife because I’m the second earner now? Not Part of The Deal”.
The data shows that women, especially BAME and economically vunerable women, have suffered disproportionately from the impact of Covid. And that is from a system that wasn’t working brilliantly for them to start with (we all know there were more men leading companies called David than the total number of women at the helm)
The proportion of women responsible for 90-100% of childcare increased from 27% to 45% (University of Sussex)
Mothers are almost twice as likely as fathers to have lost their jobs or quit (Institute of Fiscal Studies)
Over a third of working mothers have lost work or hours due to childcare issues (Fawcett Society).
3 million women in the US have been forced out of the workforce since Covid - in January it was 275,000 women compared to 71,000 men (Bureau Labor Statistics).
And it will probably get worse:
A recent survey of 3,000 managers showed that 63% of them expected to see redundancies in 2021—but 80% said their companies had not taken steps to ensure losses don’t fall disproportionately on women, or didn’t know if such measures had been introduced.
A board-level woman I interviewed this week said that they had lost 25% of the female management pipeline in a business that is already dominated by men.
This is risking a vicious cycle—too few women at the top driving policies and culture that work for women.
As we start to climb out of the pandemic, what is it going to take to get them back?
I asked Lisa Unwin, who specialises in getting women back to work after a break: she focuses on law and insurance. The answers are frustratingly nuanced and complex.
Building on Lisa’s points and having asked Twitter, I see four drivers of change (tell me what I’ve missed).
Government: childcare, equal parental leave, pay gap reporting, upgrading skills (including improving the apprenticeship levy)
Employers: track data, have strategy, value output over hours, train hiring managers
Recruiters: advertise remote & hybrid, embrace CV gaps, look beyond ‘the usual suspects’
Women: skills building, networking, knowing your value
Perhaps the most important factor that will ensure we bring women back is intent, especially in a difficult economy. Headlines about business leaders telling us to stop moaning isn’t a great sign that those in power get it: but that those words have consequences is perhaps a good sign.
The good news is that there is a massive positive to capitalise on here: the promise of normalised remote working should be great for people with caring responsibilities. I’ll be exploring these issues in a lot more detail in for a feature for International Women's Day. Do please share your thoughts.
Next week?
What Jackie Weaver and Dominic Raab’s broom have taught us about Zoom.
Christine
