A new era for working women?

‘Covid-19 could be the start of a better era for women who work’ declared the headline in the Financial Times the other day, immediately catching my eye.  The article , by Sarah O’Connor, outlined how across the globe the pandemic has provided a rare opportunity to reorganise labour markets to benefit working women.  Key to this process is reform and expansion of childcare, and recognition that flexible working – rejecting presenteeism – should be widely available.  I don’t necessarily disagree with the diagnosis or proposed solutions – and it’s clear that the pandemic has put these issues into sharp relief – but I’m rather more pessimistic about governments’ (certainly our government’s) commitment to the task. 

And it seems I’m not alone. Over on Twitter Oxford academic Abi Adams-Prassl pointed to ‘government silence’ on childcare issues, and the need for an ‘ambitious strategy’ to address this.  Furthermore, unlike previous recessions, the Covid crisis is hitting women’s work hardest, in the UK and elsewhere.  Many of the sectors which have been temporarily shuttered or limited in their scope of operations – e.g. retail, hospitality, personal services, the arts – are also female-dominated areas of employment.  And for those who have been able to work from home, all signs are that the burden of childcare and domestic labour falls on women more than men. I’ve explored this issue in a number of blogs over the last few months (e.g. here and here).  Analysis by the TUC showed that redundancies among women rose by nearly 80% in the second quarter of this year, while the equivalent figure for men stood at just over 20%.

Meanwhile, an article in the New York Times explores how American women are increasingly dropping out of the labour force in the Covid era. Figures show how the people leaving the workforce – becoming economically inactive, rather than unemployed and seeking future work – are overwhelmingly women.  What’s driving this female exodus from paid employment? The writer argues that it’s the persistent gender pay gap, which means that in many couples it still often makes sense for women to do the bulk of unpaid labour and care on top of paid employment.  They consequently suffer the kind of burnout that leads to retreat from the workforce. It’s easy to see how this could become a more general trend in many countries, including our own.  Here, a number of surveys have indicated that women are bearing the brunt of stress in the shift to remote working alongside childcare responsibilities (e.g. here), and it’s been shown that mothers are more likely than fathers to be furloughed for childcare reasons, and once furloughed to be more exposed to redundancy risk. Just at the time when the gender pay gap could be widening (the NYT article suggests it could rise by up to 5% in the States) our own government has suspended the obligation to complete gender pay gap reporting, so any evidence of these trends could fail to be captured properly.   

The childcare sector has been neglected throughout the pandemic, and many early years and after-school settings have struggled to re-open fully.  Without access to formal childcare – and with restrictions often preventing the use of informal childcare by family members – many parents find their employment options constricted.  Without the web of support underlying parental employment, the system begins to fall apart.  Hence the frequent call to recognise childcare as infrastructure – it’s not just roads and public transport that enable us to take up jobs, but childcare too.  Until we see politicians donning aprons and working playdough with the same frequency and alacrity that they put on a hard hat and high-vis jacket, we’re not likely to see support for parental employment revolutionised. So, I’m afraid that on the Covid crisis being the beginning of a transformation of women’s opportunities, my glass remains half-empty rather than half-full. After all, as the Prime Minister recently demonstrated in a carpentry workshop, he does not exactly know the drill … Build Back Better? I’d as soon Call Care Core.

A period of enforced inactivity ….

The Prime Minister’s speech to the nation at the weekend included a phrase with stuck out for me: he described lockdown as a period of ‘enforced inactivity’  – but I’m not sure that’s really an accurate description of what has been going on in many households.  For people in families, the labour of the household has if anything increased, as more people are around in the house all day, with all the extra meals and cleaning up that that involves.  Add in home-schooling and working from home, and ‘enforced inactivity’ seems a little fanciful… As I quipped on Twitter ‘if your activity was inside and you weren’t paid for it, it didn’t happen’ …

 

The veil of ‘enforced inactivity’ makes all the work going on inside households to keep the show on the road invisible.  Of course, this work is predominantly done by women for a multitude of economic and cultural reasons.  There are widespread reports that where mothers and fathers are living together under lockdown, women do the majority of childcare and housework, even where both partners are continuing to work from home.  Often this is because the men are higher-paid jobs, which lack flexibility around online meetings, so that women work around their needs, rather than the other way round. There has also been coverage of the situation in academia, where female researchers are ceasing to submit work to academic journals under pressure of childcare, while men have carried on – sometimes even increasing their submission rates – during lockdown.  As journal publication is key to promotion, this is a worrying trend in a sector which is already far from gender-equal. It’s likely that these patterns are also occurring elsewhere.

 

For the moment, childcare and schools are closed to most – only the children of keyworkers and children who are vulnerable are currently in their usual settings.  On Monday the government’s latest advice to workers began to unravel, as guidance on public transport use and what defined a ‘Covid-secure’ workplace was not immediately available, though Tuesday saw the publication of raft of documents and clarifications.  Issues around childcare were slower to rise up the agenda, with guidance for childminders to open in a limited way published overnight.  The proposals to re-open schools in June only apply to children in certain years for the moment – and it’s still a couple of weeks until then.

 

So, how can workers reconcile their childcare obligations with employers who may follow the current advice and ‘encourage’ them back to work? This question was put to the PM, and he responded ‘if people don’t have access to childcare and they have a child who isn’t back in school… then I think that’s only fair to regard that as an obvious barrier to their ability to go back to work. And I am sure employers will agree with that’.  I’m not sure how much time the Prime Minister has spent thinking about this, if he really believes that all employers are always entirely reasonable about granting flexibility for parents.  The 54,000 women laid off  each year during pregnancy and after returning to work may have something to tell him about this. Why does he think there are so many consultancies working with companies to embed flexible working policies? Why does he think there are more women with qualifications than ever, and yet relatively few at senior levels in most sectors?  A pretty major reason is that not all employers are equally persuaded of – or equally skilled at – taking caring responsibilities into account when designing jobs and retaining staff. If childcare is a problem, it is often the employee’s alone to solve. Men find their requests for flexible working turned down more often than women, and fear career damage if they take time out. The culture remains one where family life and domestic labour largely remain invisible while we’re engaged in paid employment.

 

As if to stress the inconspicuousness of caring work within families further, the latest guidance – to widespread bewilderment – allows for paid cleaners and nannies to begin to return to those households which employ them, but it remains against the rules for family members outside a household to perform such roles. Granted there is concern that grandparents (made vulnerable to the virus by age) should not be exposed to people they don’t live with – but the priority given to economic rather than social relationships rankles with a lot of people.  And of course a good proportion of working parents rely on at least some informal care in order to go to work (a third of parents use informal childcare according to the ONS) – and so will be having to put themselves at the mercy of their employers, should the ‘encouragement’ to return to work come. If Boris Johnson thinks his lockdown modifications are ‘baby steps’ he should at least recognise that someone has to be there to lend babies support.

 

 

 

Silicon Valley chickens and women’s eggs

When I read on Twitter that egg-freezing was being offered by Apple and Facebook as a perk to women employees, I thought it was a joke. But then I went and looked for coverage and found that it is in fact true. Gender pay gap? We’ve a quick fix for that darling, we’ll give you $20,000 to freeze your eggs so that you can concentrate on your work and compete on equal terms with our male employees in those crucial childbearing career-building years. Yes, we can level the playing field with invasive surgery and new technology – don’t worry about the fact that success rates are hazy, that according to nbc reporting,doctors recommend freezing at least 20 eggs, which means two cycles of treatment – thus basically blowing the entire $20,000 ‘perk’.

Or, for those really ahead of the curve, a woman could freeze one round of eggs at age 25, this would account for the first $10,000 of the ‘employee benefit’, and then there would be a $500 per year storage charge for as long as the eggs remain frozen. Oh happy days! In a reputable news source in the early 21^st century it is reported that this may mean that at ‘35, [when she] is up for a huge promotion, she can go for it wholeheartedly without worrying about missing out on having a baby’ . These words are apparently seriously quoted. Perhaps this is because it is a US news source – the wealthiest country on the planet today has no maternity leave, paternity or parental leave – a position it shares only with Liberia, Papua New Guinea and Swaziland.

Should a woman choose to freeze her own eggs for whatever reason that is one thing. But when an employer says ‘I’ll freeze your eggs so you don’t have to worry about losing out while you climb the greasy pole on our terms’, I think we should all step back and analyse what is happening very carefully.  The first thing I thought when I read about this is that hoary old song from My Fair Lady -‘Why can’t a woman be more like a man?’ Rather than thinking how the workplace might better accommodate parenthood and any kind of ‘balance’ in life for executives of both sexes, they’ve hit on a technological fix to make the status quo ‘work’ for women. There’s a line in that (even less PC than I remembered) song that rings incredibly true to this whole mindset – Rex Harrison asks of women ‘Why don’t they straighten out the mess that’s inside?’ – a view which fits perfectly with the tech companies’ vision of extracting those problematic, perishable eggs to re-insert when ‘convenient’. We have to ask when convenient for whom. There are few words in the Forbes article covering this item which give a clue: the ‘perk’ is offered to women and their male partners; and a few others are cited in the nbc article: ’offering this benefit “can help women be more productive human beings.”’ Is it time to be very afraid? If a man or a company asked me to freeze my eggs I know what I’d say to them …

Meanwhile, back in the land of the ‘level playing field’ I thought that the idea was that we looked at the possibilities that technology offers for more flexible work arrangements, that empowerment comes from combining employment with family life. I thought that the skills we all gain and the knowledge we acquire from the demands of our closest relationships has real value – the kind of value that transfers to the workplace, as we endeavour to solve problems with other people. I thought technology was giving us new opportunities to flex and adapt the current corporate system to incorporate employee well-being and the returns that this brings. That’s what I’d call innovation. But clearly Silicon Valley is way too chicken for that.