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16 Dec 2020
by Dr Duncan Brown

Long read: Picturing a better way forward

Working women, especially mothers, appear to have been disproportionately hit by the pandemic. It has forced an even worse work-life imbalance on some homeworkers and pushed others out of the labour market altogether, while key workers – who are predominately women – are at increased risk of catching Covid at work. As a result, we face an impending ‘she-cession’. But is this really the result of Covid-19, or is capitalism itself and its male-dominated economics to blame?

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A picture of work freedom, or domestic enslavement?

Adrian Tomine’s wonderfully Hopper-esque cover picture for New Yorker magazine brilliantly captures the double-edged, contradictory impact of the pandemic on working women.

A young woman sits at the centre of his picture at the dining table in her cramped New York bedsit, phone in one hand and cocktail in the other. Her laptop is precariously perched on a pile of books in front of her, and while she is smartly attired in blouse and earrings above the waist, she is wearing shorts and flip flops below, surrounded by the accumulated mess of weeks spent in lockdown. Any notion of that terrible phrase ‘work-life balance’ abandoned long since.

On the positive side, particularly early in lockdown, many commentators saw the shock of the virus’ remarkable impact on our working lives as an opportunity to enhance women’s career and earning prospects; given that having children at home has been shown in many prior research studies to have a hugely negative impact on female work futures (although not, interestingly, on fathers).

This so-called ‘motherhood penalty’ was originally measured as an earnings gap of 4% after the first child and 12% the second (Waite, 2001). But now, even in egalitarian Denmark it creates a 20% earnings gap between mothers and equivalently qualified single women. Home and flexible working for many professional and white collar occupations ballooned in lockdown, with the numbers working at home rising from 5.7% of workers in January 2020 to 43.1% in April, according to the Office for National statistics (ONS).

Greater openness of employers to working in this way seems likely to be a permanent shift in practice. It has resultedin Standard Chartered, Lloyds, Zurich Insurance and a number of other large financial institutions declaring that employees can essentially work where they like. Caroline Whaley of Shine, a consultancy that aims to improve gender balance in companies, is among those feeling cautiously optimistic about opportunities for businesses to harness the lessons from Covid-19 to improve working environments in ways that can boost gender equality.

“One very obvious solutions is flexibility, a notion that was not backed by many businesses pre-pandemic, which has now become key,” she says. “If done right, flexible working will be a game-changer for women's careers.”

The gendered, unequal impact on work, jobs, health: the she-cession

Giving evidence last month to the House of Commons’ Women and Equality Committee’s inquiry into the gendered and unequal impact of the pandemic, it was hard to be that optimistic. Most of the information gathered indicates that the forced bringing together and growing demands of both work and home life on working women during the pandemic have taken a heavy toll.

This double-crunch on their time has seen, according to October’s ONS employment figures, more than 400,000 women, many working part-time, drop out of the UK labour market entirely in the first six months of the year. Most have fallen into the ONS’s category of ‘economically inactive’, rather than ‘unemployed’ claiming benefits and looking for new work. 800,000 women did the same in Tomine’s USA in September alone.

Looking across 38 countries, data from UN Women found that before the crisis women did three hours of unpaid domestic and caring work for every hour by men, and that time and that difference have increased significantly over the past six months, prompting their fears of ‘reverting to 1950s gender stereotypes’. More widely, they found a general lack of action by governments to recognise and address the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on females.

IES analysis of the more than nine million workers who have been on the government’s furlough scheme, and planned redundancies by employers in the months ahead, concludes that “low-income workers are bearing the brunt of the coronavirus pandemic”. These workers are “more likely to be women, to be lone parents, to be from certain ethnic minority groups, and to have no qualifications”.

Women are much more likely than men to be in precarious jobs and in low-paying sectors, such as entertainment and hospitality, which have been among the hardest hit by the lockdown and now recession. Unlike the last recession, this now seems likely to be a downturn heralding a major rise in unemployment, with a record number laid off in the last three months, and female workers disproportionately affected. That this population of low-paid, low-power female workers is already apparently being prioritised in redundancy exercises, is possibly even more concerning from an equality perspective.

Women also predominate in key worker roles which are mostly unamenable to homeworking, and where we have seen the highest occupational mortality rates from Covid, notably for care home workers and retail shop assistants.

American professor of economics Tara Sinclair describes this as a ‘she-cession’, or more accurately a ‘mom-cession’. Her international analysis shows the biggest decline in mostly service sector jobs with high female representation, and the employment rate for mothers falling by over 50% more than those for men and single women.

Women’s pay as well as employment seems likely to suffer, with analysis of annual gender pay gap reports from more than 5,000 employers, published before the government’s hastily announced suspension of the 2019/20 requirement in March, indicating that the average gap had increased over the previous year by 1%. And as REBA’s co-director Debi O’Donovan highlights, this pay gap runs through into an even bigger pension and wealth gap, with the average female pension pot estimated to be worth £100,000 less than the average mans’.

Crisis or capitalism to blame?

"Contemporary capitalism is incompatible with feminism" — Mariana Mazzucato, a professor and economist at the University College London.

London-based professor Mariana Mazzucato doesn’t believe that such gendered problems are solely down to the pandemic. Rather, the virus and its economic impact has shone a searching light on an already-failing economic system. She believes that modern private companies, often benefitting from substantial state and public investment, focus on narrow considerations of shareholder returns, while equally male-dominated governments and economists consider narrow definitions of GDP and growth, rather than the total wellbeing of the whole of society. Price and cost trump value.

Take executive pay. Fewer than half of the overwhelmingly male executives in our major companies took a pay cut this year in response to the pandemic, despite millions of the UK’s low-paid employees being placed on a lower pay rate and at the expense of the public purse through the government’s furlough scheme. The majority of these pay cuts have already been restored. The authors of a recent report from The Pipeline note that ‘there remains a woeful lack of women CEOs’ in this elite executive population, an ‘abysmal situation’ when amidst the largest 100 UK companies, if you have a son called Peter then he is more likely to be a FTSE 100 chief executive (six of them) than your daughter (only five female CEOs).

Actually that was in June. Amanda Blanc’s appointment as CEO at Aviva in July made the odds even with Peters. Yet even under our current version of capitalism, the Pipeline report shows that FTSE 350 companies with no women on their board are 10 times less profitable than those whose boards have already achieved the original 30% Club voluntary target set a decade ago.

As well as the benefits of greater diversity, Mazzucato describes how the pandemic has highlighted the importance of major state intervention to keep many of these private sector companies afloat. She also believes it has demonstrated that ‘our most valuable, irreplaceable citizens’ are not male-dominated executives, bankers or economists, but these lower-paid and less-protected workers, ‘those who work in health and social care, public transport, supermarkets: - jobs disproportionately occupied by women’. ‘Suffering’ she writes, ‘is not inevitable for those groups, it is a policy choice’.

We heard from Chancellor Rishi Sunak at the end of last month that one policy choice to reward the commitment of public sector workers during the pandemic will be a pay freeze next year. A recent report from the International Labour Organisation highlighted that the Covid crisis has ‘led to a worsening of wage inequality around the world’, only partly offset by state support schemes. The share of the lowest paid workers of the total wage bill has fallen globally this year from an average of 27% to 23%. Sunak’s policy seems unlikely to help.

Sparring on LinkedIn last week with an old colleague who specialises in executive reward, I was told that the problem with many of those who, like me, oppose the pay freeze, was that their arguments were ‘too emotional’ and lacked economic logic.

Yet in the final section of his new book launched last month, Pope Francis states that the more balanced and emotional perspective women bring to political and economic decision-making is what the world needs now. He urges leaders to reprioritise 'value' over 'price', and that 'taking wealth is not the same as making' wealth. He writes that the world has lost sight of what value really means and highlights the success female leaders around the world have had in tackling Covid-19 in recognising this.

Practical progress post-pandemic: establishing and breaking down barriers

Explaining her strict and well-respected lockdown policy eight months ago, New Zealand premier and mother Jacinda Ardern described a special exemption for ‘both the tooth fairy and the Easter Bunny to be essential workers’. Ardern has the highest confidence-through-the-crisis ratings of any world leader, and New Zealand has had an astonishing low Covid cumulative death rate of 5.1 per million citizens under her empathetic but firm leadership. Analysis by the Financial Times of female political leaders more widely finds that their countries’ lockdown conditions were no stricter than those of their male counterparts. But as the Pope says, those led by females have displayed both significantly lower death rates and better economic performance.

In female-led Iceland, Norway and Finland, the deaths per million have kept well below 100, in Denmark and Germany, they have stayed under 250. ‘That is much better than in male-led countries’ according to the FT’s analysis – in Italy, the UK and US it was above 780.

As Gus O’Donnell, the (male) former head of the British civil service, recently pointed out in a speech to the Institute of Fiscal Studies, pandemics cannot be beaten by medical science alone; instead, ‘containing the pandemic is achieved mostly by changing behaviour’, encouraged by leaders who are strong on empathy and humility, rather than hubris.

Chairs and CEO’s of our largest companies often now explain away their continuing appallingly-white-male Boards and their failure to bring these leadership styles into their companies on the basis that, according to the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s research: “‘there simply are not enough qualified women in the pipeline – women are assumed to lack the necessary skills to sit on Boards, or not to aspire to Board directorships’.  

Yet the evidence from my own and other research is, as the Commission also points out, the opposite and that: ‘a plethora of research actually suggests that persistent gender stereotypes create biased judgments about the competence of potential or actual female Board directors, or about the suitability for top corporate roles…women directors (in reality) were found to possess more human capital compared to their peers – specifically, they were more likely to hold MBA degrees, to have multiple sector experience and to have international experience’.

Moreover, they estimated that 2,551 women were already in (and largely being ignored in) these FTSE companies’ talent pipelines. The barriers are largely in the heads and policies of existing leaders, who lack the heart that the Pope and Mazzucato describe as being needed in economic and business policies.

My own experience is that relatively small investments in practice and support can have a major impact on that female talent pipeline, pandemic or not. Take Zurich Insurance for example.

Since 2019 Zurich has been promoting a Flexwork (policy), empowering employees to work where, when and how they choose. Working with the government’s Behavioural Insights Team, Zurich has seen remarkable success from simply adding six words to its recruitment ads for all positions. Roles are all now available on a ‘part-time, job share or flexible working’ basis. Coupled with the use of gender-neutral language, their one-year trial has seen the number of female and male job applicants double, applications for management and higher-paying roles from women have increased by 20%, and the number of women hired and promoted into senior roles is up by 33%.

According to Steve Collinson, Zurich’s head of HR, with such initiatives “employers could open the floodgates to a wider pool of untapped talent”. And according to their promoted people technology consultant Helen Chomeley, “flexibility removes the ‘mum-guilt’ feeling – I can be a mum and a technology consultant”.

At the other end of the income spectrum, when my IES colleagues asked the low-paid female key workers in their research what additional support they would value, their recommendations included: greater assistance with job searches, retraining and childcare for those currently unemployed; better awareness of workers’ rights and legal protection in context of Covid-19; and a range of financial support measures – from access to free financial advice services to further raising Universal Credit. This is pretty much what us supposed-experts recommended to the House of Commons Women and Equality Committee at our evidence session.

Picturing a better post-Covid world

In Let Us Dream: The Path to a Better Future, Pope Francis writes of the importance of changing dominant mindsets for new visions and models. ‘We are not condemned to economic models whose immediate interests are limited to profit...and are unconcerned with human, social and environmental costs. Development cannot be restricted to simply economic growth  –to be authentic it must be well rounded and integral.'

The book explains how the pandemic has taught us that we must make the world safer, fairer and healthier for all people now. ‘I see thinking that is not ideological, which moves beyond the polarisation of free market capitalism and state socialism, and which has at its heart a concern that all of humanity have access to land, lodging and labour.'

Mariana Mazzucato imagines a very similar world to be possible as soon as 2023, with the required shift in leadership and policy decisions. It will be a world where ‘we have not only beaten Covid but used the recovery as an inflection-point towards a new world which is greener, more inclusive and more sustainable based on innovation-led growth’. In the immediate-term, state support to companies must be ‘conditional on maintaining jobs, securing minimum wages, halting share buybacks and ensuring worker representation on boards’.

But it’s not just governments and companies that need to change their priorities to build this kinder, more equal world: we all do.

Artist Tracey Emin, well-known for her confessional and controversial artwork, and now one of the first two female professors to be appointed at the Royal Academy since it was founded in 1768, can afford more than a bedsit. But she has had a pretty awful lockdown by any standards, diagnosed with cancer and her life saved by major surgery over the summer, when it seemed highly unlikely that she would live until Christmas.

In a remarkable interview, she talked about now feeling reborn – “I feel like I’ve been forgiven, I feel like this is the real true beginning”.

As a society she believes many of us will have had brushes with our own and our loved ones’ mortality in the pandemic, and that should help us ‘to realise what’s important and what needs to change in a more caring and empathetic, kinder society…We’re on the cusp of something, and there’s no more messing around’.

So, let’s get on with it ……..

The author is Dr Duncan Brown, independent rewards adviser and researcher, and visiting Prof University of Greenwich.