Women bearing economic, emotional and psychological brunt of pandemic

Various sources have made it clear that in their analysis women are bearing the emotional, financial and mental health brunt of the coronavirus pandemic, experiencing greater anxiety about its impact, more likely to be struggling with work and childcare or doing unpaid care work for relatives at home, and more likely to be employed in low paid caring or face-to-face hospitality roles often on part-time or zero hours contracts.

In March, more than 50 organisations signed a statement calling on government to consider the specific challenges faced by women as a result of the crisis.

Rachel Powell is chair of the Women’s Policy Group (WPG) and the Women’s Sector Lobbyist here in Northern Ireland. She has had overall responsibility for putting together a Covid-19 Feminist Recovery Plan and has been campaigning ardently to get the Executive to take a gendered approach to its recovery strategy.

The Women’s Policy Group NI (WPG) is made up of women from trade unions, grassroots women’s organisations, women’s networks, feminist campaigning organisations, LGBT+ organisations, migrant groups, support service providers, NGOs, and human rights and equality organisations. The WPG Feminist Recovery Plan presents evidence of the disproportionate impact the pandemic is having on women alongside its recommendations to mitigate against this through wide-ranging policy reform.

“Women have always done the majority of caring roles and even pre-pandemic were economically disadvantaged compared to men, and Covid has intensified this,” said Powell. “The structural inequalities that existed beforehand, though not caused by the pandemic, have been exacerbated by Covid. We have been calling for the Executive to acknowledge this salient fact and then we would passionately like to see policy innovations that would work to change this reality and that is why we are arguing for a gendered approach to Covid recovery.”

There are a substantial range of policy recommendations the WPG would like to see implemented, across six pillars, the first of which is economic justice.

“We have been calling for a women’s employment strategy and that has been largely because of the fact that 31% of all women are not in paid work and the main reason for this is due to family and home commitments,” explains Powell. “That’s almost a third of women who are economically inactive because they are doing unpaid care and domestic work. Such a huge proportion of our society were already locked out before the pandemic, but then equally there are a lot of women struggling in sub par work - 80% for example are in part-time roles, and are vastly over represented in low paid sectors such as the care sector and face-to-face jobs in hospitality and retail which were badly impacted by the pandemic.

“Many women stuck in undesirable employment are in this position because of the prohibitive cost of childcare, something which we strongly wish to see addressed.

“Women are also more likely to take on caring responsibilities for other family members or friends than men, and this is unpaid but significant labour.”

Northern Ireland, notes Powell, is the only part of the UK and Ireland without government-funded childcare provision. The New Decade, New Approach agreement did include a commitment to childcare provision for three to four year olds, though this has not been implemented.

“In England, Scotland and Wales there is a model of 30 hours of free childcare available per week. But here childcare has been left out the whole way through Covid recovery strategising and we think this is a grave disservice to women. Labour markets tend to be hugely gender-segregated, with women taking on the bulk of low paid work. We are campaigning for greater family leave frameworks to help enable all parents to have a greater work-life balance.”

In the ten years leading up to the pandemic there was vast austerity measures implemented across the UK, and there are reports from HM Treasury to suggest that 86% of those savings came from women’s incomes.

Rachel continues: “When we asked women how they had been impacted by the pandemic, 65.4% said that they had suffered financially through having less savings, increased debt, and are now struggling to pay bills.

“Women in Northern Ireland are disproportionately affected because 91% of single parents here are women, we have increased use of food banks, and so many women who are being targeted by the benefit cap or the two child benefit cap, which are devolved issues that we want the Executive to change. But there has been no action taken on the welfare reform mitigations and so many women are suffering immeasurably because of this in real economic deprivation with their families.

“There is what we could call the ‘feminisation of poverty’ because women are the shock absorbers in families; if there is not enough food they are most likely to be the ones going hungry so that there children can eat. Disabled women are also being extremely hard hit too.”

All of the WPG’s policy recommendations are evidence-led, yet Powell reveals there has been very little response from the NI Executive. The organisation added research incorporating the voices of 150 women here who are being directly impacted by this policy inaction in their 300-page plus report of policy change recommendations.

Some support for a gendered covid recovery strategy has come from the All Party Group on UN Security Council Resolution 13:25 (Women, Peace and Security) by chair Paula Bradley and vice-chair Mike Nesbitt. But it has not been enough, emphasises Powell, who reveals that though summaries of all of these policy recommendations were sent to every Minister in the Executive, all that the group received was a “dire response from the Civil Service displaying a complete lack of understanding of the issues we are raising.

“We have been asking Ministers to meet us since July last year, and only one Minister, Naomi Long, has met with us so far. Nichola Mallon has also engaged with us and we have repeatedly asked the Health Minister Robin Swann to meet with us on the impact of the pandemic on women’s health, and so far he has not met with us.”

The WPG’s research has also made clear that socioeconomic deprivation is having a real impact on women’s mental health: “82.1% of women have told us that they have experienced a decline in their mental health since the start of the pandemic. Additionally 67.9% said they had experienced a decline in their physical health. Further, 81.1% of women in NI said their caring responsibilities had increased.”

Powell points to the fact that ten years of austerity have led to Northern Ireland having the worst performing health service of any UK region, with over-long waiting lists exacerbated by Covid and a huge shortage of nurses, lack of movement on provision of abortion and perinatal mental health services, and issues such as sex discrimination and online harassment further contributing to women’s hardship.

Powell’s priority would be to see the care sector acknowledged as a core part of our central economic infrastructure which includes child care, elder care and more.

She added: “Really if we were able to start adequately investing in our care sector and really start to value the unpaid caring work that women do, we could effect profound change and women would stop having to face such significant economic disadvantage.

“The unequal distribution of care work between the sexes is something that is recognised across the world. And if we don’t address this there is a real risk that any progress we have made on gender equality across the past few decades will be lost.”