Much in this world has been and continues to be, built on the backs of women.
In the last 25 years, we’ve made headway in increasing gender equality, but amidst the pandemic wake, we now find ourselves at the risk of losing all we’ve established.
Even before covid, women across different regions, socio-economic classes, and cultures spend an essential portion of their day performing unpaid care work.
+80% of my followers are women; therefore, I will forego the list.
Pre-pandemic, it was estimated women carry out three-quarters of the 16 billion hours of unpaid care work done each day around the world.
In other words, before coronavirus, for every one hour of unpaid work done by men, three hours was done by women.
That figure is now estimated to have doubled.
If American women earned minimum wage for the unpaid work they do around the home and caring for relatives, they would have made $1.5 trillion in 2019.
Globally, women would have earned $10.9 trillion.
2020’s unpaid figures are gobsmacking.
The social, financial, and psychological setbacks women around the world now must confront are profound.
As it concerns women in the workforce and economy, there is much to lose and not just for women.
In September 2020 alone, in the US, approximately 865,000 women left the labor force compared to 200,000 men, due mostly to the reality that there was a care burden and nobody else to step in.
Unfortunately, it took a pandemic to expose the reality that unpaid work has been the social safety net for the world and has made it possible for others to earn a productive income while hindering most women’s growth and employment opportunities.
One cannot underscore sufficiently how great this crisis is and how significant an impact it will have if governments, businesses, and families don’t address the issue.
It’s not an understatement to say, “if women stop, the world stops.”
It’s is not just a question of rights; it’s also a question of what makes economic sense.
And it makes economic sense women participate fully in the economy.
