Lesson plan
- Read the articles below and compare what is happening in Great Britain and the USA, write a short summary of the articles
- Discuss your findings in your group
- Using a shareable document in Word or Google docs, the group writes an article where you discuss your findings
- If time write how this compares to other countries
No 10 pulls ‘sexist’ Covid ad showing all chores done by women
The row comes at a time when twice as many mothers as fathers say they will have to take time off with no pay due to school closures or a sick child, raising further fears that the economic fallout of the pandemic is falling disproportionately on women’s shoulders.
A May report from the Institute for Fiscal Studies and the UCL Institute of Education revealed that mothers in England were more likely than fathersto have lost their jobs during lockdown, and were able to do only one hour of uninterrupted paid work for every three hours done by men.
The government said the ad did “not reflect” its “view on women”. Conservative MP Caroline Nokes, chair of parliament’s women and equalities select committee, tweeted the image and commented: “Someone signed this off.”
That the image was published was indicative of a government with a blind spot on gender equality, said Mandu Reid, leader of the Women’s Equality party.
“This kind of typecasting makes my blood boil – the people who produced this are dinosaurs,” she said.
It provides further evidence of the crisis of imagination and competence at the heart of government which has already resulted in women being expected to work, teach and care for children without any support.”
She added: “The government needs home-schooling on the impossible realities of Covid parenting, otherwise it will be more than their artwork that is stuck in the 1950s.” Read the rest of the article here
The global economy is now in its worst downturn since the Great Depression. One of the unique aspects of the current recession is the way it’s impacting women: though men are more likely to die of Covid-19, the pandemic’s toll on employment is heavier for women. Unlike other modern recessions, the pandemic recession has led to more job losses among women than among men. While the 1970s marked the start of ‘mancession’ periods in industries like construction, the current ‘shecession’ is heavily affecting sectors like hospitality and retail.
These sectors employ many women and are also vulnerable to lockdown measures. Some effects are already visible. Globally, women’s job losses due to Covid-19 are 1.8 times greater than men’s. In the US, unemployment has intensified the most for the personal care and food service occupations, where women predominate. Source BBC
How COVID-19 Sent Women’s Workforce Progress Backward in the USA
Key findings
- The COVID-19 pandemic has dealt a striking blow to a child care sector that was already failing to support all families, and 4.5 million child care slots could be lost permanently.
- There were nearly 10 million mothers of young children in the labor force in 2019. This report explores how insufficient child care could affect their work, their wages, their long-term economic outcomes, and the economic recovery.
- This report estimates that the risk of mothers leaving the labor force and reducing work hours in order to assume caretaking responsibilities amounts to $64.5 billion per year in lost wages and economic activity.
- Without both immediate and long-term action to shore up the child care infrastructure and establish more progressive work-family policies, the United States cannot achieve continued economic growth nor protect and advance gender equity.
The pandemic is underscoring generations of inequitable social policy
This blow to the economy will not be felt equally but rather will fall most heavily on women of color. U.S. policies and norms have long pushed women of color into the workforce—into jobs that pay less and purposefully have fewer workplace protections—while setting up barriers, and in some cases supports, to keep white women out of the workforce. The choices made by policymakers—primarily white men of means—have deliberately failed to establish a robust care infrastructure and family-supporting workplace policies and have not addressed the nation’s outdated mismatch between school and work schedules. All of these factors contribute to the vicious cycle of racism and sexism, whereby not having good child care and workplace policies in place is both a cause and effect of discriminatory cultural norms and the gender and racial imbalance in resources and formal positions of power. source
Women accounted for all of U.S. job losses in December, dramatically underscoring the pandemic’s unrelentingly disastrous impact on working women.
Actually, it’s even worse than that: Technically, women accounted for more than 111% of jobs lost last month. The U.S. economy lost a net 140,000 jobs in December, the first month since April that total payrolls declined, the Labor Department said Friday. But women lost 156,000 jobs overall during the month, while men gained 16,000 jobs, according to an analysis by the National Women’s Law Center (NWLC).
The government’s grim monthly report, the last released under President Trump, shows the pandemic’s ongoing wreckage of the U.S. economy—and the extent to which that damage has been felt by women, especially women of color. Black and Latina women working in retail, restaurants, and other “essential” service-sector industries, often for very low pay, have been disproportionately laid off amid the pandemic’s lockdowns and business closures. Last month, as worsening coronavirus casualties led to new shutdowns, leisure and hospitality employers cut 498,000 jobs—almost 57% of which were held by women. (These losses were only somewhat offset by net job gains in other industries, including the holiday-season retail sector.) Source Fortune
