Time to focus on equality after Covid set women back

In Britain in January, over 50,000 NHS staff were reported as off sick with COVID. Numbers in developing countries are unknown. Picture: Getty Images

The 2021 theme of International Women’s Day is #ChooseToChallenge, which seems purpose-built for the current uprising against sexual harassment and worse against women.

In New York, Governor Andrew Cuomo is fighting to keep his job, and in Australia, not one but two government ministerial careers are on the line. There is something else we should doing on International Women’s Day.

We should be taking stock of what has happened to the status of women in Australia and all over the world after 12 months of the pandemic.

And leaders — business and political — should be thinking very hard about how the drive for gender equality in the workplace can get back on track.

The setbacks for women are everywhere. Take the frontline in health, where the physical and mental toll on nurses, so many of them female, has been horrific. In Britain in January, over 50,000 NHS staff were reported as off sick with COVID. Numbers in developing countries are unknown.  Writing in the British Medical Journal last month, David Berger, an Australian GP emergency doctor based in Broome, said that at least 3000 healthcare workers in the US died between March and December 2020, and in Britain that number is believed to be over 850.

“Shall we persist in cajoling and manipulating healthcare workers ‘up the line to death’, or shall we pay them the respect they deserve and do whatever it takes to accord them a safe, dignified, caring workplace? How have healthcare workers allowed this to happen?” asked Dr Berger.

At a household level in Australia, statistics confirm the anecdotal evidence that COVID has increased inequality.

The double whammy of cuts to lower-paid service jobs and the abrupt closure of childcare and schools left women with the bulk of the mopping up.

As ANZ chief economist Richard Yetsenga writes in The Australian today, even women with degrees fared dramatically worse than their male counterparts.

If one of two working parents were forced to give up work to cover home schooling for example, the practical decision was for the one with the lower salary to do so — most likely, the woman.

There are anecdotal reports of a baby boom in Australia, although in the US, the Brookings Institute anticipates 300,000 fewer births as a results of the pandemic with job insecurity and health concerns high in mind.

One important bit of good news out of COVID is that the shift to work from home imposed a new flexibility in the workplace at scale.

Most business leaders now see work flexibility as ‘‘baked in’’ which is very different to pre-COVID.

The bad news is that working from home is no friend of women who want an equal opportunity to get ahead.

As we emerge from lockdown it is men, not women, leading the way back into the office. There are a host of reasons for this, including the traditional one of women being the lead underwriters of kids’ home and school life.

The effort required for many women to relaunch into the workplace and work from the workplace after either working from home or not being able to work at all is huge.

Yet unless women are visible at work, they risk being set back in their ability to impress their direct reports, their opportunity to learn the ropes and absorb corporate culture and indeed the whole “right place, right time” opportunity for promotion — that chance for a plum job overseas when the borders come down.

Zoom has been great, but it is no substitute for sitting a few socially distanced paces from your boss and your boss’s boss. And it is up to those bosses to help right the unfairness imposed by COVID, especially now that the economy is picking up again.