Has the Covid-19 pandemic stagnated efforts towards diversity, equality, and inclusion?

Has the COVID-19 pandemic put the brakes on advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion?

A brief background on the gender equality issue:

Gender equity is a cardinal cause in fighting for equality issues at the workplace, from combating the motherhood penalty to addressing issues of individual's single parenthood related to hiring and promotion prospects as well as career development-related issues. 

No one has heard of the illness COVID-19 or coronavirus in his last years. The disease outbreak everyone has heard of here is the global pandemic that dramatically affected how people worked, embarked on travel, and related with one another. Severe modifications have been experienced in our day-to-day activities, and it is only now that most of us are beginning to return to the little normalcy we enjoyed in 2019.

What was the new normal?

It turned into commuting to work, dressing up, and attending meetings and other in-person projects, and eventually, all of it came to a standstill. Everything eventually turned into something digital, though it is not something new because this was something that most people had to experience since all nations were on lockdown at one point in time. Families and couples adopted a different way of living; they stayed in contact with everyone and sometimes had to work from home. This article is being written in a post-lockdown era.

Countries and international organisations set up objectives before the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic to achieve equality and gender equality. For instance, laws were put in place to ensure that countries were making public efforts and that all countries were given equal opportunities and equitable experiences at the entry to and within the organisations. However, equality of the genders reached a tipping point before the COVID-19 pandemic, but many more issues arose due to the pandemic that affected different people, especially women.

How were women affected?

Many families and couples were cohabiting under tension during the lockdown, which resulted in several women becoming stay-at-home wives. In most cases, this was also combined with their work. Domestic and personal care, because the woman was generally regarded as the one looking after the child, was assuming a larger share of the parenting responsibilities in the family. Such activities may include taking care of the children, maintaining the house's hygiene, and doing household chores.

The Guardian refers to this phenomenon as the 'motherhood penalty.' It does not come as a surprise that women are already forced out of the restriction of seeking paid employment when such women become mothers or have caregiving responsibilities. UK Centre for Fiscal Studies reported this. Therefore, many women, particularly mothers, are deprived of reasonably paying jobs as it is habitual that the care tasks are defaulted to the mother. Although the achievement gap has always been there, the pandemic made it worse as women focused more on taking care of their children than advancing their paid jobs, especially while in quarantine with their whole families during the lockdown.

It should also be noted that in a study by the OECD. However, men were assuming more domestic duties; women were still reported to be performing twice the amount of work of the men with whom they were splitting their caregiving responsibilities.

Some researcher's questions have changed from before.

It has been noted that until the advent of the pandemic, a considerable section of the UK female population, more so migrant women, was associated with less pay or none due to their domestic duties. The same Guardian article cited earlier also estimated why men earned more as their occupations came with more risk, whether physically, mentally, or financially, where there were minimal or low-paying jobs to be left. Nevertheless, if one examines the jobs available during covid, essential jobs such as medical, transportation, supermarket staff, and many more were occupied mainly by women virtual workers. Minimum wage jobs were the covid period, which continued to be required many times over and turned out to be some of the critical jobs with a degree of risk.

There are a variety of perspectives on how companies handle administrative data, such as finding ways to enhance job security on pay and many more. This coming month, DJM will be releasing a comparative essay-style article that will cover the issues of gender parity in the UK and some countries of other regions in a fashion that has depth. Gender parity was one of the major struggles in the corporate world for equality.

In this blog, we will also include a podcast for those who prefer audio content, and some like and will listen to it, so a new one is coming up shortly!