IWWAGE-Institute for What Works to Advance Gender Equality
Intersecting Identities, Livelihoods and Affirmative Action: How Social Identity Affects Economic Opportunity for Women in India
This paper presents a landscape assessment of the current state of gender inequality in the economic sphere in India, which is a key facet of overall inequality. The assessment comprises the latest empirical evidence based both on demographic survey data, as well as key results from cutting-edge scholarly literature. Male–female gaps are significant in many dimensions, but the contours of these gaps are shaped by the overlap of gender with other social identities, such as caste, religion or tribal identities. Thus, women from stigmatised and marginalised groups are disadvantaged along two dimensions and have to battle the double stigma of this intersectionality.
The paper outlines the trends in overall gender gaps in the areas of labour force participation, self-employment and education over the last couple of decades, but highlights the role of intersectionality that goes into producing structures of advantage and disadvantage. The paper discusses policies such as the National Rural Livelihood Mission designed to encourage self-employment, which have had several other positive impacts, such as increase in empowerment and autonomy, but their record in terms of enhancing livelihoods is mixed at best. Evidence shows that policies such as employment guarantee schemes or transport infrastructure could end up having positive gendered effects, despite their gender-blind design. The paper argues that in order to tackle inequality fundamentally, we need to mainstream evidence-based research on intersectionality, which should be the basic lens informing policy.
Global Policy Summary: Childcare Crisis
A year into the pandemic, we are no longer just worrying about progress on women’s equality coming to a standstill. We’re now seeing the possibility of such progress being reversed. Globally, women tend to work in low-paying jobs and in the informal sector—precarious employment that has been upended by lockdowns and COVID-19 restrictions. Adding another layer to this burden, women’s unpaid care work is soaring. The childcare crisis is at a tipping point. Despite being key to human well-being and to the functioning of the economy, care work remains unrecognised, undervalued, and predominantly performed by women and girls the world over. The pandemic has accelerated the demand for care work and exacerbated entrenched gender inequalities. Childcare must be addressed within our COVID-19 recovery plans both to advance gender equality and because it makes fiscal sense.
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), and IWWAGE at LEAD have collaborated to undertake an evidence review of the current childcare crisis and the road for post-COVID recovery and resilience. This brief based on the paper released on International Women’s Day, March 8, 2021 outlines the different pathways in which COVID-19 is impacting women’s care burden, with recommendations for policy solutions and measures that could be explored in different contexts by governments, the private sector, and other key development actors, with a focus on low- and middle-income countries (LMICs).
Global Executive Summary: Childcare Crisis
A year into the pandemic, we are no longer just worrying about progress on women’s equality coming to a standstill. We’re now seeing the possibility of such progress being reversed. Globally, women tend to work in low-paying jobs and in the informal sector—precarious employment that has been upended by lockdowns and COVID-19 restrictions. Adding another layer to this burden, women’s unpaid care work is soaring. The childcare crisis is at a tipping point. Despite being key to human well-being and to the functioning of the economy, care work remains unrecognised, undervalued, and predominantly performed by women and girls the world over. The pandemic has accelerated the demand for care work and exacerbated entrenched gender inequalities. Childcare must be addressed within our COVID-19 recovery plans both to advance gender equality and because it makes fiscal sense.
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), and IWWAGE at LEAD have collaborated to undertake an evidence review of the current childcare crisis and the road for post-COVID recovery and resilience. This brief based on the paper released on International Women’s Day, March 8, 2021 outlines the different pathways in which COVID-19 is impacting women’s care burden, with recommendations for policy solutions and measures that could be explored in different contexts by governments, the private sector, and other key development actors, with a focus on low- and middle-income countries (LMICs).
Evidence Review of the Global Childcare Crisis and the road for post COVID-19 recovery and resilience
The devastating impact that COVID-19 has had on women’s livelihoods cannot be overstated. Globally, women tend to work in low-paying jobs and in the informal sector—precarious employment that has been upended by lockdowns and COVID-19 restrictions. Adding another layer to this burden, women’s unpaid care work is soaring. Childcare must be addressed within our COVID-19 recovery plans both to advance gender equality and because it makes fiscal sense. In addition to reducing the undue burden of care, affordable and quality childcare frees mothers up to participate in the labour force and creates decent jobs for women in the childcare sector. Currently, gender gaps in labour force participation in OECD countries cost the economy about 15 percent of GDP. Yet, so far, we have not seen the mobilisation of public, private, and foreign aid funding that is urgently needed to tackle this crisis. The inequalities women face are not new. But the pandemic has exacerbated and laid them bare.
Policymakers must seize the opportunity to rectify this crisis, both as part and parcel of an inclusive COVID-19 response and for the benefit of future generations. This paper has recommended a range of policy solutions and measures available to tackle the COVID-19 exacerbated childcare crisis and pave the road for post-COVID-19 recovery and resilience. Together, these recommendations are aimed at promoting a comprehensive childcare agenda and at recognising the provision of quality childcare as a societal responsibility—as opposed to women’s responsibility alone. We acknowledge that there will ultimately be trade-offs that countries will need to make and our goal has been to present a broad range of available evidence, examples, and promising practices to help countries decide how best to allocate their finite resources and chart a path forward.
Covid childcare crisis reversing decades of women’s economic progress – report
The childcare crisis is at a “tipping point”, threatening to reverse decades of women’s economic progress, according to a new report published on Monday.
The report warned that the female-dominated childcare sector risked collapse, as coronavirus lockdowns and rising poverty levels had led to a “steep drop” in demand for formal and informal services.
Balancing paid and unpaid care was particularly hard for poorer women working in the informal sector, which offered no paid leave, social protection, or the chance to work remotely, said the report, published by the International Development Research Centre, the Growth and Economic Opportunities for Women East Africa initiative, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, FemDev and the Initiative for What Works to Advance Women and Girls in the Economy.
The Covid pandemic had exposed the extent to which childcare falls on women, who are on average now spending more than 30 hours a week looking after children, it said.
“A year into the pandemic, we are no longer just worrying about progress on women’s equality coming to a standstill. We’re now seeing the possibility of such progress being reversed. The devastating impact that Covid-19 has had on women’s livelihoods cannot be overstated,” it said.
“The childcare crisis is at a tipping point. Childcare must be addressed within our Covid-19 recovery plans both to advance gender equality and because it makes fiscal sense.”
Anita Zaidi, president of the Gates foundation’s gender equality division, said poverty levels among women had been expected to drop by 2.7% between 2019 and 2021. “But actually now it looks like poverty for women will go up by 9%. That’s almost 50 million more women globally in poverty,” she said.
The closure of childcare centres could be devastating. “Women who want to come back into the labour force cannot, because those childcare centres don’t exist. Many women have to go to work, otherwise they have nothing to eat and they don’t have shelter, so what they are then doing out of desperation is their older girls are not going back to school and have to look after the younger kids so mum can work,” she said.
Childcare provider Kidogo estimates that about 60% of families in Kenya who were previously using its centres have shifted care responsibility to girls as young as eight.
Zaidi said childcare should be subsidised and needed to be regarded as a societal issue, not a problem for women to solve. “Childcare is a critical barrier to women’s labour force participation and with women not participating in the labour force economies will not progress,” she said.
Last week, the UN Development Programme (UNDP) called for the “immediate introduction” of a temporary basic income to ensure women who face the harshest economic impacts of Covid-19 are able to survive the pandemic. A monthly investment of between 0.07% and 0.31% of developing countries’ GDP could lessen the impact of the pandemic for up to 2 billion women, it said.
