Sizing up the She-cession

6 minute read

Having experienced Ireland’s worst ever recession at the peak of our earning powers and now a decade later the economic fallout of a pandemic – at a time when we should all be well-settled in productive, fulfilling careers – for many midlifers, the past 15 years have been like an old-fashioned game of Snakes & Ladders – one minute you’re up, the next you’re down.

The childhood board game dates back to ancient India, and when it was introduced to Victorian England, it was used to reinforce traditional 19th-century values, so ladders on the board represented thrift, penitence and industry, while the snakes stood for indulgence, disobedience and indolence. The Victorian message of morality behind the game was that the former led to success, the latter failure.

If only life had been this straightforward over the past decade and a half? If only hard work and prudence had guaranteed achievement and success? Instead, for many women, it hasn’t mattered how many ladders they’ve climbed since the late noughties, they still haven’t made it to the top. One unforeseen and catastrophic event after another has sent us tumbling, as if the ladders had been silently greased behind our backs. Perhaps we would all have been just as well to blow on dice and hope for the best?

Many women I know don’t feel in control of their careers. While the last recession knocked everyone for six, this Covid-19 crisis is mainly impacting those industries dominated by female employees, from hospitality and retail to beauty therapy and the arts.

To put this “pink” recession – as it’s being dubbed in Australia – into cold hard figures, global management consultants McKinsey have estimated that women’s jobs are 1.8 times more vulnerable to this crisis than men’s. And according to a survey by The National Bureau of Economic Research, which analysed employment figures in 28 developed countries in North America and Europe, the economic damage was worse for women in almost every country analysed.

While it’s tough for any woman to lose a job, for those of us in midlife and for those older again, the stakes are exceptionally high; mortgages must be paid and families looked after, while re-entering the workforce after an absence becomes more difficult with every decade. In fact, the International Labour Organization has warned: “previous crises offer some cautionary lessons for the current one. They illustrate that when jobs are scarce, women are denied economic opportunity and security relative to men.”

Anecdotally, I’ve heard of many working mothers who have simply abandoned their jobs over the past 12 months in order to cope with childcare in the absence of creches and schools, and to give over the time necessary to homeschooling. This appears to be reinforced by a Lean In survey of American employees: while 8% of women said they were considering giving up work or going part time, only 2% of men had similar thoughts. A survey by the Irish Business and Employers Confederation (Ibec) in April, meanwhile, found that 20% of organisations in this country reported that women were requesting greater flexibility for child- and elderly care, and that they were under increased pressure and stress.

In an interview with The Guardian earlier this year, president and chief executive of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research (WPR) in the US, C Nicole Mason – the woman who coined the term ‘she-cession’ to describe an economic downturn that affects women disproportionately – explained that the primary reason women are losing their jobs or leaving them, and the chief barrier in getting women back to work is, in fact, care. While she’s referencing America, the cost of childcare here, and a failure by government to recognise the value of home carers (most of whom are women), is an issue that has raged in this country for many years, but has never been resolved, and it’s added another level of difficulty to women’s experience of the Covid downturn. In fact, according to data from UNESCO, the extent of school closures has been directly related to the severity of job losses for women. For instance, in the US and Canada, schools were closed for the longest time (52 and 43 weeks respectively) and female employment fared worst. In France, schools closed for just 11 weeks, and female employment losses were among the lowest.

Ariane Hegewish, earnings and employment programme lead at the WPR, explained to the BBC that the real danger of this current downturn is that, “people are starting to associate women with childcare more strongly than before.” She’s concerned that going forward, employers may assume that all women are burdened by caring responsibilities and so will be less likely to fast-track these employees to senior positions. Could the pandemic possibly reverse all the employment wins women have achieved over the past several decades?

Visibility of women in senior-level positions is vital if the next generation is to continue to make gains for women in the workplace. While the pandemic and its aftershock will require complicated and multifaceted solutions, there is one simple message emerging from all the surveys, studies, papers and periodicals devoted to the she-cession in recent months: caring responsibilities need to be shared by couples so both have an equal chance at career fulfilment, and single mothers need stronger supports. As Mason said in the interview cited earlier, the solution to the she-cession involves “repairing broken systems”.

Ibec head of social policy Dr Kara McCann agrees. “We need to shift to an equity agenda,” she explains, “that ensures we are putting the right measures in place to actively correct the historical wrongs and systematic barriers that leave women and gender diverse people behind…” That makes perfect sense, doesn’t it? But if women continue to drop out of the workforce at the current rate, and there aren’t sufficient numbers of us in government, on advisory boards or in senior management positions, where will the push come from to implement meaningful change and disrupt the status quo?

We must remember that we are our own best allies, and we need to do as Hillary Clinton advised: “Resist, insist, persist, enlist.”

Marie Kelly, July 2021