‘She-cession’, the word may have stuck more women in this lockdown time.
Most employees were working from home from the very start of the pandemic. It has been almost two years, and the pandemic seems to have made itself a part of our lives. But many companies decided to call the employees back to the office. Men were the first ones to return. If you have observed closely, many bankers and frontline medical workers never got an opportunity to work-from-home, in the first place.
If you are wondering what ‘she-cession‘ means, read on. The pandemic’s effect on women’s careers has been termed ‘she-cession‘. If you are a woman reading this, you may have already encountered this scenario. You must be missing out on those office conversations and lunchtime gossip. It is admissible that you cannot remove them from your work culture and cannot replicate the same on virtual platforms.
The Pandemic and She-cession:
Many women have been caught in the web of the pandemic. And, it is applicable not just to one state or country but to the entire world. In the aftermath of the pandemic, many women simultaneously had to perform the work duties and those of a mother. The reason was that children were at home with schools remaining closed. Women had to take on the role of the caregiver as usual in double-income families, whereas the men went out to make money and supposedly earn that bread for the family.
Gender inequality takes center stage over here. Such cases have been noted since the very beginning of the pandemic. It is mainly a legal, cultural, and societal situation that does not seem to be going away anytime soon. Women’s progress in the last decade has been entirely suppressed today, once again. As industries closed, more than 15 million jobs were dissolved in the UK alone in the last two years.
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In most cases, the women’s community got affected the most. Women unemployment reached an all-time high in this era. Women make up 50% of the job market but have been the worst affected.
According to this global study, between 2020 and 2021, around 26% of women faced the loss of employment, and only 20.4% of men reported unemployment. Moreover, girls also face gender-related violence in the aftermath of the pandemic. During this phase, many girls were forced to work at home as enslaved people.
Impact On the Indian Economy:
Many women entered the unemployment phase as the pandemic took over the world. You must recall the date 25th March 2020, when the lockdown occurred. Most companies forced women employees to resign first. There was no first-in, last-out scheme working at that time. If we talk about India alone, a whopping 17 million women lost their jobs in the first month.
Moreover, women in their 20s were the worst affected. You can delegate the reasons to the family-supportive responsibilities of married women. When the economy and women, in general, were recovering from the shocks of demonetization and GST, when Coronavirus struck. In this timeline, many women were also forced to switch to work from home mode, with pay cuts. Many migrant women workers at construction sites and call centers also lost their jobs. Many government schemes also fizzled out.
Women and the she-cession statistics:
The women in Indian society have been the worst affected due to the pandemic. Even 8 months after the pandemic, 13% fewer women were employed compared to 2% of men. If you talk about medical workers, women had to choose between losing their jobs or facing the Covid-stricken hospital and clinic settings. It meant that many women frontline workers even lost their lives while acting as their patients’ caregivers. The glass ceiling was already there, and the pandemic made it worse.
As India and global economies started recovering, women seemed to be a part of the neglected lot. Thus, some countries have started introducing policies to bring back the lost glory of women’s employment. Around 1,400 policies and measures have been enacted worldwide. Gender-sensitive policies have made headway in various arenas. Some countries today have been more successful than others in enacting such policies. In India, the same does not seem to be happening. Despite our finance minister announcing many such policies, no specific aid has been given for women’s employment.
What more the government comes up concerning women’s employment in India is to be seen. The government should stress the dual role women play at home and in the workplace. Women’s entrepreneurship and skill development also take center stage. So, you need to keep a tab on the latest developments about women’s development and make she-cession a forgotten term.
