The COVID-19 and the Widening Abyss between Men and Women in India
By: Gayathry P R
Tags: Gender In The Workplace, Covid 19, Covid 19 Crisis, Gender Equality

The percentage of women who lost their jobs due to the pandemic is 17% of the total workforce in India

The COVID-19 has adversely affected the social and economic systems of almost every country. According to a WHO report released last year, the pandemic was likely to push 10 million people into poverty and around 890 million people into undernourishment by 2021.

For developing countries like India, the pandemic has not only disrupted the economic system but has also robbed the nation of whatever advancements it has secured in the field of gender equality. According to a survey titled “COVID-19 and gender equality: Countering the regressive effects’’ conducted by Mckinsey Global Institute, women represented 20% of the total workforce in India before the pandemic and the percentage of women who lost their jobs due to the pandemic is 17% of the total workforce. These results are particularly disturbing because most of the men who lost their jobs regained it once the restrictions were relaxed and that it is still the women who are left out.

The survey conducted by Mckinsey Institute probed into this matter and found that the pandemic disturbed the already unbalanced social and economic composition of India. As a country that still glorifies the idea of an earning man and a woman who can cook and rear kids, the pandemic has proved to be a fertile breeding ground for the already widespread gender stereotypes.

The Mckinsey survey reveals startling data about the amount of unpaid care work done by women in various South Asian and Middle-Eastern countries. 90 percent of unpaid work is done by women in these countries. Oxfam’s 2020 India Inequality Report — On Women’s Backs, throws further light on this graveness of the issue by estimating that the amount of unpaid domestic work women and girls of India contributes is equal to a monetary contribution of ₹19 lakh crore (trillion) per year to the Indian economy.

With the outbreak of the pandemic, the unpaid and unacknowledged domestic work of women increased by about 30%. With the shutting down of daycares and schools, working moms are now working 2x times, hence juggling between work and family. This additional burden forces women to choose between their careers and family. If this trend is likely to continue, the participation of women in the workforce will rapidly decrease to a point where it will have a direct impact on the Indian economy as a whole.

This increase in the number of women dropping out from employment when Work from Home is becoming the new normal may seem quite surprising. But this again points to the prevalence of gender stereotypes and the need for the enhancement of paid child care in India.

In India almost 13.8% of microenterprises are women-owned and the workforce in these are primarily women. With the COVID-19 outbreak, most of these enterprises faced a serious setback in one way or another. For some, the unexpected pandemic exacerbated their financial conditions, while for others the demand for digital devices for their schooling forced them to step out of the role of an entrepreneur.

The pandemic threw open the potential gates of employment to the 120 million secondary educated women in India.

The pandemic has reversed and widened the abyss between men and women in India. There are existing government policies and laws to bring women into the mainstream, but times have proved that it isn’t sufficient to bring about the desired change. Even though the pandemic has forced women to make choices, it also started the work-from-home culture and thus threw open the potential gates of employment to the 120 million secondary educated women in India. But for this opportunity to be a reality, the government must work for a deep-rooted change that is gender-inclusive and powerful enough to shatter the crystallized gender norms and stereotypes.

Reference Articles

All India Report of Sixth Economic Census

COVID-19 aggravates gender inequality — Burning at the stake are women

COVID-19 and gender equality: Countering the regressive effects

Pandemic has worsened gender inequality in India, says Oxfam

Opening with care