The pandemic has been incredibly sexist. Globally the recession, wrought by Covid-19, has ruthlessly targeted women – women who shouldered the burden of caring through reduced hours, women who found their jobs were the first to be shelved when work dried up, women who found that their employer’s polices didn’t support them.
If the UK is to Build Back Better, employers have to address the structural inequalities that are locking talent out of our workforce.
So how did we get here? From equal pay to glass ceilings and the emerging evidence of a pension funding gap, the pandemic has ripped apart the last 20 years of workplace equality programmes.
The pandemic has been the first truly existential lived experience arguably since the Second World War. We’ve learned that we are more interconnected, that our economies are more interdependent and that our workforces are more agile and open to change than we ever thought.
We’ve also learned that women’s engagement in the workplace is dominated by two very powerful and complex trends; that of the care burden and workplace policy.
For our children, for our elderly and for those most in need in our societies we have evolved successful, complex systems of care. That burden though has never been shared equally.
In 2020 The Kings Fund described the widening gap between care service demand and supply like a crocodile’s mouth, and emphasised the compounding effect of the long term impact of UK Government social care funding cuts. Reducing the availability and accessability of care will only increase the care burden.
Whether caring for children or older relatives, millions of women have made career and employment choices that left them exposed to more precarious industry sectors and the double edged sword of job flexibility. This has left millions of women unknowingly more vulnerable to a sharp economic shock. Such as the type of shock brought about by a global pandemic.
McKinsey & Co estimates that women’s jobs disappeared 1.8 times faster than men’s and points to the lasting impact of what we lose when we lose women from the workplace.
Then there is workplace policy. Our workplaces, their policies and their design are failing women. From the gender pay gap to women’s health and job design, today’s workplaces have considerable room to improve. The pandemic has not only targeted women but has especially discriminated against older women.
More older women in the UK have lost their jobs in this recession than in the last recession, according to the ONS, with the unemployment rate highest for women aged 50 – 64.
In a recent research paper, Frost & Sullivan pointed to the unintended consequence of workplace policy, the pandemic and the lack of adequate menopause support. The report found employer policy is failing women at a cost of some £108bn ($150bn) in lost productivity each year. Bloomberg recently reported that over 1 million women have left the workforce due to a lack of workplace adjustments for their menopause symptoms. These are women at the peak of their experience, at the peak of their earning potential and at the peak of their pension savings power.
Is it any coincidence that the UK gender pay gap is at its widest for older women, or that studies show that women’s pensions are worth just a fifth of that of men’s?
With employer focus firmly on recovery the women’s health agenda has often slipped or been overlooked entirely – disenfranchising millions of older women.
So what can employers do? It’s time to support women back to the workplace, back to our workforces and back to fulfilling work. The UK economy can’t build back better if millions of people are excluded from the plan.
We are asking that employers, working hard on their return to work strategies, secure and retain women in the workplace and help them to feel different, with a focus on three policy developments and investments – better workplace financial education & member engagement to close the pension funding gap, placing a premium on true flexibility for carers and offering effective support for parents, and normalising the menopause and women’s health with adequate workplace investments & adjustments.
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