Hello everyone I hope you have been good and keeping safe.I’m still continuing with the post on gender equality since the pandemic began n I hope each and everyone will learn something.
While most people’s lives and work have been negatively affected by the crisis, our analysis shows that, overall, women’s jobs and livelihoods are more vulnerable to the COVID-19 pandemic. The magnitude of the inequality is striking: Using data and trends from unemployment surveys in the United States and India, where gender-disaggregated data are available, we estimate that female job loss rates due to COVID-19 are about 1.8 times higher than male job loss rates globally, at 5.7 percent versus 3.1 percent respectively.
At a country level, the data suggest that in the United States, women made up 46 percent of workers before COVID-19. Factoring in industry-mix effects suggests that women would make up 43 percent of job losses. However, unemployment data indicate that women make up 54 percent of the overall job losses to date. Similarly, in India women made up 20 percent of the workforce before COVID-19; their share of job losses resulting from the industry mix alone is estimated at 17 percent, but unemployment surveys suggest that they actually account for 23 percent of overall job losses. Our analysis finds that the gendered nature of work across industries explains one-fourth of the difference between job-loss rates for men and women. The lack of systemic progress to resolve other societal barriers for women explains the rest.
The nature of work remains significantly gender specific: women and men tend to cluster in different occupations in both mature and emerging economies. This, in turn, shapes the gender implications of the pandemic: our analysis shows that female jobs are 19 percent more at risk than male ones simply because women are disproportionately represented in sectors negatively affected by the COVID-19 crisis. We estimate that 4.5 percent of women’s employment is at risk in the pandemic globally, compared with 3.8 percent of men’s employment, just given the industries that men and women participate in. As Exhibit 1 shows, the reason is that women have more than the average share of employment in three of the four most affected sectors, as measured by employment declines globally. Compared with the aggregate share of women in global employment—39 percent—women have 54 percent of global jobs in accommodations and food service, which are among the sectors worst affected by the crisis; 43 percent of jobs in retail and wholesale trade; and 46 percent in other services, including the arts, recreation, and public administration. Some sectors, such as manufacturing, in which men are a large majority of those employed have also been severely affected. Other sectors, such as education and healthcare, where women are the majority have suffered relatively little impact.
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