Women and jobs: Will 'work from home' push more women into the workforce?
“Consider it a preview” most researchers opine as they highlight
how the lockdown has
impacted women employment and reversed gains made in recent years. A working
paper from Azim Premji University titled “Down and Out? The Gendered Impact of
the Covid-19 Pandemic on India’s Labour Market” highlights that women in India are 7
times more likely to lose work during the national lockdown and 11 times
more likely to not return to work after a job loss.
CMIE data, which perhaps is the best indicator to determine job
losses, shows a persistent decline in the employment rate for urban women.
Before the start of the pandemic, 7.5 per cent of women in urban areas were
employed. The number fell to 5 per cent in April and has barely recovered
since. Data from February 2021 shows an employment rate of 5.4 per cent.
However, there is a catch. Even before the Coronavirus (Covid-19)
pandemic hit, employment rates for urban women were falling in the country.
From a high of 11.2 per cent in August 2016, the employment rate for urban
women had dropped to 6.9 per cent in December 2019. The pandemic, in that case,
just accelerated the trend.
Not just India, in January, the US’s National
Women’s Law Centre reported that nearly all the jobs lost in the country in
December belonged to women. While women lost 156,000 jobs, men gained 16,000
jobs during this period. The study further states that since February 2020 —
when the pandemic started spreading across the country — women have accounted
for 55 per cent of the total job losses. In 2019, women in the US workforce
outnumbered men for the first time since the start of the decade.
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