In the UK’s lockdown spring, Capital Economics’ Jennifer McKeown found herself juggling her job and the new roles of “teacher, entertainer, cook and cleaner” overnight. “It was extremely difficult. You just constantly feel guilt about either not being with the children… or about not doing your job.” For all that pressure on working mothers, McKeown was at least “grateful” she still had a job. Others have been far less fortunate.
From home working to booming online sales, the great truism is of Covid-19 as an economic and social accelerator, ushering forth years of progress in months. But when it comes to women in the workforce, economists fear the accelerator is stuck firmly in reverse, despite all the talk of “levelling up” Britain.
Critics of a government, whose senior echelons are entirely dominated by men, bemoan a lack of focus on a childcare crisis exacerbating the strain on women, with MP Caroline Nokes flagging the issue as the “big elephant in the room”. Abi Adams-Prassl, an economist at the University of Oxford, warns: “An absence of clear policy statements has been quite stark.”
The problem is urgent though. Previous recessions have been “man-cessions”, hitting men far more sharply than women in the labour market. In the early Nineties, the male unemployment rate hit 12.7pc, compared to 8pc for females. After the financial crisis, 9pc of men were out of work at the peak, compared to 7.8pc of women.
But in the Covid slump, the pain has been shared more equally due to the acute sectoral focus of a pandemic which shuttered shops, bars and restaurants.
Resolution Foundation figures show women outnumbering men by more than two to one in leisure and travel roles, and by almost as much in retail and customer services jobs. The Institute for Fiscal Studies finds that women are around a third more likely to work in affected sectors than men.