Coronavirus has forced a new normal on everyone around the globe. It means working
from home, if you can. It means juggling childcare WITH work, if you can. And it means creating
new or different streams of revenues to be able to survive - if you can. Many say this
new flexible way of working is a great thing for women - but is it really?
No, it's not a great thing for women. I remember all the memes that were flying
around the internet when the lockdown was first announced to remind us to be cheerful
and excited about socially distancing, and working from home because this is when William
Shakespeare and Isaac Newton did their very best work, of course when it was the plague
and they were locked in. But the classic and important thing to notice there is that neither
of them had childcare responsibilities.
Lauren Currie is the CEO of Stride and the Founder of Upfront, organisations focused
on getting women’s voices heard.
You know, I think working at home, can be easier and potentially even nicer than going
to an office if you have a well-paid job with benefits and security. Being in lockdown can
be nicer and even quite fun if you have a garden and a spacious house. But when all
of a sudden there's no childcare, couples have had to have this hard conversation about
who's going to take the hit. And we know that it's women who take the hit.
And why is that?
Because in Britain 40% of women work part time compared to only 30% of men and we know
that in heterosexual relationships, women are much, much more likely to be the
lower earners, so when that conversation happens, it sent most couples back to the 1950's,
because women have had to step up to take the majority of the childcare on and we know
that our economy is subsidised by women's unpaid work. And I think this pandemic has
made that so obvious and so evident, hopefully in a way that cannot be ignored any longer.
And globally, we know that women are the majority of the informal workforce, many of the jobs
that haven't been allowed to happen during lockdown. And not only that, we know globally
that women make up more of the lower paid jobs, the social care, the teaching, health
work positions, and again, these are the jobs that you haven't been able to do from home.
So has coronavirus potentially bought us backwards in terms of feminism and equal opportunities?
Yes, I think has. You know, even if we think, to the state of play before the virus, young
women especially, those who were struggling to live on low or no pay were being ignored,
undervalued, underpaid, the jobs crisis will hurt women and young women
in particular, the worse. You know, we know that in every single country around the world,
women earn less, they save less, and they're more likely to be in a precarious job, and we
don't have adequate childcare and the consequences are disastrous.
So then how worried are you then, as a feminist, that this pandemic is going to take us back,
I mean, God forbid, to the 1950s?
I am extremely worried. I think the data is absolutely terrifying. So I sit on the board
of a charity called Pregnant Then Screwed, it's a maternity discrimination charity, and they
surveyed over 25,000 women and the data is very, very scary. You know, women have been
completely side-lined during this pandemic. And now, even if we start to shift our attention
to recovery plans and back to work plans, they are still being ignored. And there are
huge elephants in the room around the BAME community and the impact that Covid has had
on women from those social groups that are being ignored.
There are many couples around the world who have found a way to share the load of working
from home together during this pandemic. But are businesses and corporations stepping up
to enable this to happen?
There are many good decent men with very good intentions. Who have told me that they would
like to do more at home, they can see the burden on their wives
or partners. But that actually, their own bosses are far less sympathetic when they
indicate that they need to help out than the bosses of their wives are.
Gill Whitty-Collins is the author of ‘Why Men Win At Work’ and a former vice-president
at Procter and Gamble, the multinational consumer goods corporation.
So I think that just those stereotypical gender roles of who does the housework, who looks
after the kids have always been there, and I think they've been made extremely visible
through this. The other big dynamic is how people are valued how
men versus women are valued at work. We know that in general, men are more likely
to get the big jobs more likely to get the promotions. Now, it's not just
a case of who's going to get the promotion.
Now it's actually a question of whose job's going to go, who are we going to let go, because
we need to let some people go. The reality is that if women are less likely
to get promoted, they're also more likely to be
let go. So there are a number of dynamics. that mean that this is hitting
women very hard. It's hitting gender equality very hard. It's hitting them in the home.
I mean it is hitting them in their careers and it will hit them in the next few months,
a year, as potentially they lose their career altogether.
Do you think this exacerbation of gender inequality is reaching the people it needs to? Do you
think the light is shining on it enough for policymakers and leaders to really take it
seriously?
I really hope so. You know, it's interesting because in the first few weeks
of Covid, I was actually really optimistic. Obviously, I wasn't optimistic in general,
but about gender equality, I thought surely now, surely the men who are not, you know,
pulling their weight surely they're going to see, they're at home, they're
going to be working from home, they're going to see that their wives, partners, you see
how much work they're carrying, and they're good, decent men, they're gonna step up. And
actually, you know, that all the survey data says that hasn't happened at all. And, but
I think that as you say, what has happened is something that has always been an issue,
which is women taking the lion's share of the unpaid work, as well as doing the paid
work. It's always been an issue, but I think it's reached such a critical point. I think before,
women could, in general, just about cope, they were exhausted, but they could just about
do it. I think covid's tipped them over the edge to I can't actually do all of this. And
I think that's made more people speak up. And more people register the issue. I think,
not just the housework childcare issue and the unpaid work issue, but also, you know,
the issues of industries that have been particularly hit by this that are hugely led and run by
women, for example, the beauty care industry, which was one of the last ones to be opened
up. So I think the only positive thing is that it's tipped the issue to a point that
people can't stay quiet anymore and can't you know, roll their eyes and just get on
with it. And I think women are having to speak up and make demands. And so yes, I hope that
that will have an impact on the people who make the decisions and the people who
have to take bring us out of this bring businesses out of this bring society out of this in a
positive way, which will require strong healthy women. So I hope so. I hope so. But the reality
is it takes an enormous amount to get gender equality discussed, there is very much a
"not now dear" response to gender equality. I think the suffragettes face the same thing in the,
during the war. And so it takes a lot. It takes a lot to shift it and one of the
big issues, of course, is that you know, by definition, men are largely in power, and
women are not represented enough in leadership and represented enough at the table, which
means the voices are not heard as clearly and as quickly as they need to be.
Men make up the majority of positions in power around the world - whether it’s as a company
CEO or Head of State. US President Donald Trump formed a Coronavirus Taskforce made
up of twelve men - eleven of whom are white. Can policies really be gender-smart or inclusive
if women aren’t even at the table?
My full name is Saunoamaali’i Dr Karanina Sumeo. You can refer to me as Karanina
Karanina is New Zealand’s Equal Opportunities Commissioner. New Zealand has a female head
of State - Jacinda Ardern….and incidentally has one of the lowest rates of covid deaths
and cases in the world.
We are really fortunate here in New Zealand, of course, because our Prime Minister is a
woman. Around the cabinet table and associate ministers and all those roles, you know, there are
10 women and 17 men. So it's not 50/50 yet. But you know, it's pretty dominant. And amongst
that whole group of 27, it's really diverse. You've got indigenous peoples in there, you
got ethnic minorities in there, you've got rainbow representatives in there. So we're
really, really fortunate here, that when we are planning our response to Covid, you've
got that diversity there. Perhaps in other countries, perhaps
haven't been invited to the table. You can have diversity, but you've got to be at the
table where the decisions are being made. So it's really, really important. So we are
fortunate here, but also if I look at our business sector, we've got some
great leaders who are women holding CEO roles. We look at our social services sector. You
know, we've got really, really strong women there. And they cannot be silenced those voices.
So I suppose we, you know, we like to be optimistic in New Zealand, I think we've got the numbers,
we've got the capacity, we certainly have the influence and the leadership from women.
And I think that's made a big difference in terms of New Zealand's response to the crisis.
And New Zealand has really been held up as the poster child during this pandemic, and
certainly in the foreign news and what we read and hear about New Zealand.
How much do you think that is down to having
much more gender inclusive people around the table I mean, if you look at the countries
who have performed better, they are generally female-led: Finland, New Zealand, Germany.
Is it a coincidence? Or is it that more people are making the decisions together?
I think it's the latter. I don't want to estimate what
our men are doing, of course. But you can't ignore the fact that when women are at the
table, even the words we use to respond to crisis are different. So you know, the word
kind and kindness. It's almost become our national strategy here in New Zealand, because
the Prime Minister talks about it all the time, so we all talk about kindness. That's about
people. Yes, yes, our economy has been affected. But people come first, our families, we talk
about our children, we talk about our elderly. So we're not talking about economics 24 hours,
we're talking about our people and about our responsibility to each other. So I think yes,
when you got women at the table, the dialogue, the narrative is affected. And when you've
got women in the media,
the stories that are given prominence make a difference. And the stories are about
people and about our children about us as a community and about love and family. Of
course, it affects the general psyche of a country. So it's really, really important
to have those those voices of women, you know, diverse women, not just that not just the
elite women or but you know, the diverse with our young women, you know, they need to be
at the table and we don't get it right all the time. But we're doing our very best.
So...to the big question then. Has coronavirus been a disaster for feminism? Lauren Currie,
CEO of Stride and the Founder of Upfront, is adamant with her answer.
Yes, it has been. And that's why you know, the work that I'm doing. The work that I'm
doing at Stride is about giving people who are at the start of their career who probably
don't even identify with the word leadership because of these unhelpful narratives to realise
that everybody is and can be a leader and leadership happens at the school gates around
the family dinner table, and in the boardroom, and the work that I'm doing at Upfront is about
helping people build that muscle on how to speak up for themselves, but also speak up
for others, you know, to ask questions like, who is not in this room? Whose voice are we not
hearing, you know who wrote this story? Who benefits from us hearing the story, if it's
being told in this way, and I think each and every one of us, regardless of if we are employed
or not, if we have a team or not, you know, there's lots and lots of ways that I think
of it as like micro support, you know, every time we spend money, every time we watch a
television program, every time we click something on the internet, we are giving support to
that piece of content or that person or that business. And if we all can
do that in a much more intentional way, you know, prioritise reading books and buying
from businesses created by black women, you know, prioritise funding, your local businesses
that are family run, you know, and it's all of these small things that if we focus on
them, and these things become mainstream, they can make a difference.
For Gill Whitty-Collins, the author of ‘Why Men Win At Work’, rather than coronavirus
being a disaster for feminism, she thinks it could be a turning point:
I hope and believe that ultimately it will be an enabler for feminism. So I hope that
ultimately, we will look back on this and say that Coronavirus was a catalyst for feminism
and for driving equality. But we need to take that opportunity and we women everyone need
to stop accepting the way things are and staying quiet about it. I think it's time now, to
stop being positive, patient and polite about gender inequality. We really need to take
this as an opportunity to make some change to get some action. And to make some real
progress.
And I asked New Zealand’s Equal Opportunities Minister, Karanina, the same question - is
coronavirus a disaster for feminism?
I don’t think so. In fact, women leaders are stepping up, they’re not letting people
get away with things, they’re very, very vocal, our young women, our young leaders,
are speaking up. It’s a real opportunity for us because we don’t, you know, we can’t
go back to what it was before, but we have to give people who are making the decisions,
spending the money, some ideas on how to do it better, and I like to think our young people
will go to vote and make themselves heard, because the future is for them, that’s what
we’re shaping, we’re shaping it for them, so I’m very optimistic.
That’s all for today’s Business Daily. I’m Tamasin Ford. Our producer today is
Edwin Lane. And for more, please download our
Business Daily podcasts.