Women: At the heart of the Covid fight, and now fighting the discrimination that came with it

With the combined impact of Brexit and the Coronavirus pandemic, the UK is changing at such a significant rate that the post-pandemic world will bear little resemblance to what came before. It need not be repeated that this crisis has exposed the inequalities embedded in our society – so much is clear, with BAME, gender and socioeconomic disparities widening at an alarming pace. The real question is what a responsible policymaker would do now, and whether the policymakers we have are doing anything at all.

Women have been at the heart of the fight against Covid-19. They make up nearly three-fifths – 58% – of the 10.6 million people identified as “key workers”, putting themselves at personal risk to serve on the frontlines of the pandemic. This includes 79% of social care staff, who have tended to some of the most clinically vulnerable populations, and 81% of those in education and childcare occupations.

But women did not just bravely fight to keep our public services running, they also had to shoulder the bulk of the burden at home. According to research by the Fawcett Society, two-thirds of mothers did most of the housework in their households, much of which involved childcare duties (58%) and caring for other adults (30%). How did our country repay women for these heroic acts? By forgetting them entirely.

The ways in which women’s issues have been dismissed during the pandemic are multiple, but let’s start with childcare. Women lose out both when they are professional carers and when they are performing unpaid care duties for their own families. The vast majority (96%) of childcare professionals are female, one in eight (13%) of which are paid less than £5 per hour. Despite this shockingly low pay, the UK has some of the most expensive childcare in Europe, forcing many mothers to sacrifice working hours even in pre-Covid times – a factor consistently identified as a major driving force behind the UK’s stubborn 15.5% gender pay gap. During the pandemic, this situation worsened, as childcare facilities largely closed. In response, nearly twice as many mothers than fathers reduced their working hours, thus sacrificing pay.

This crisis was no secret, with campaigners raising the alarm from early on in the first lockdown, yet in both the Summer Economic Statement and the Winter Economy Plan, the provision of childcare was not mentioned at all – an oversight the Women and Equalities Committee described as “astonishing“, especially given evidence that barriers to childcare is a leading factor in employers making women redundant during the pandemic.

Between March and November 2020, 160,000 women were made unemployed and it is expected that this figure will have risen even further over the last three months due to the disproportionate impact of lockdown on female-dominated industries such as hospitality and low-paid retail jobs. While a similar number of men were also made redundant, the latest data shows that falling employment amongst men was largely driven by work loss among the full-time self-employed, while among women it was part-time workers that suffered the most. Women were also significantly more likely to be insecurely employed – such as on zero-hour contracts or agency work – where earnings and hours have fallen significantly more than among those with secure contracts.

These trends expose problems embedded in the UK’s labour law framework, which has long failed to promote equal work opportunities for men and women. The inadequate provision of parental leave and pay, and the gender pay gap, have forced most families to stick to traditional gender roles in which it is the mother who reduces her working hours and the father whose income is relied upon more greatly. This, alongside the low wages and precarious conditions within female-dominated industries like social care, have destabilised women’s work, allowing them to fall more easily into underemployment and poverty.

Disturbingly, another significant factor in job losses among women during the pandemic was a horrifying rise in discriminatory behaviour by employers – especially against women starting families. Pregnancy discrimination has always been shamefully under-regulated. Before any of us had even heard of Covid-19, one in nine pregnant women and new mothers were already being sacked or made redundant, one in five were experiencing harassment, and one in ten were discouraged by their employer from attending antenatal appointments. But now, even more women are suffering. By July – just a few months into the pandemic – a survey by campaign group Pregnant Then Screwed found that 15% of women had been made redundant since the crisis began. Even among those who kept their jobs, nearly half (46%) of pregnant women who were suspended from work due to their clinical vulnerability to Coronavirus lost pay as a result.

Reform is clearly needed, but the government’s long-anticipated Employment Bill is nowhere to be seen and its plans to “build, build, build” put men front and centre by focusing investment into male-dominated industries such as STEM and construction. Post-Brexit, the situation may just get worse left in the hands of a Business Secretary with a long-held obsession with eroding workers’ rights (although he now claims to have experienced a Damascus moment on this issue!), a leading Party that forced through a Trade Bill that leaves the female-dominated NHS up for sale, and an Equalities Minister who promised to move the focus of the Equality and Human Rights Commission away from women.

Perhaps this government’s attitude towards women can best be seen in Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s dismissive response to news that his Self-Employment Income Support Scheme had short-changed around 75,000 mothers because the programme he designed had based their allowance on their income during maternity leave rather than their normal earnings. Self-employment has its “ups and downs … for all sorts of reasons,” he retorted, “whether maternity, ill health or others”.

It’s clear that women will not find an equal footing in the workplace until employment is made secure, female-dominated sectors like care are no longer devalued, and families are supported by their employers to allow mothers and fathers to equalise responsibilities for childcare. We, at the Institute of Employment Rights, propose that insecure work is abolished through the introduction of a universal employment status of “worker” that affords all people with the full suite of workers’ rights from day one on the job; paternity leave and pay should be improved to help women return to work; sectoral collective bargaining should be promoted in female-dominated sectors like social care to lift pay and conditions; and no one should be allowed to sack a pregnant woman without the approval of an independent labour inspector.

These changes would require a wholesale shift in the government’s attitude to both work and women, but what better way could we respond to a time of extraordinary change other than through extraordinary changes?

This article was originally published in Sisters magazine