India, US employment surveys show Covid-19 can skew gender parity

McKinsey report puts women job losses twice as high as men

Gender bias, with regard to job losses, seems to be another fallout of the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic.

According to a report, released recently by management consultant firm McKinsey & Co, while most have been negatively affected by the crisis, women’s livelihoods are more vulnerable to the pandemic.

“The magnitude of inequality is striking: Unemployment surveys in the United States and India, where gender-disaggregated data are available, suggest that female job-loss rates resulting from Covid-19 are about 1.8 times higher than male job-loss rates,” the report said. 

Similarly, in India, women made up 20 per cent of the workforce before Covid-19; their share of job losses resulting from the industry mix alone is estimated at 17 per cent, but unemployment surveys suggest that they actually account for 23 per cent of the overall job losses, says Anu Madgavkar, partner with McKinsey Global Institute, a think tank within McKinsey and co-author of the report, titled ‘Covid-19 and Gender Equality: countering the regressive effects.’

What’s causing the imbalance? 

 “One reason in our analysis shows that globally female jobs are 19 per cent more at risk than male ones. This is simply because women are disproportionately represented in sectors negatively affected by the Covid crisis,” says Madgavkar. 

Women are already under-represented in manufacturing and there is a risk that the number would slide even further. While there may be emotional triggers at play driving that exodus, “The point is that men’s jobs are typically considered to hold more value in the ambit of family  and are therefore less likely to be foregone at a time like this,” says Madgavkar. “There’s research to show that 50 per cent of respondents in South Asia believe that when jobs are scarce, men should get the job and not women, and that reflects societal biases,” adds Madgavkar.

A glaring imbalance comes to light with two key factoids for India: Women make up 20 per cent of the workforce but represent 23 per cent of job losses, and unless action is taken now to prevent it, gender disparity could further slide. Taking steps to prevent that could create an incremental GDP  of $712 billion by 2030, according to McKinsey. 

As with all dark clouds, there is a silver lining. 

The biggest opportunity is to create a structured system for all the untracked work that women do such as early childcare, senior care, domestic services, private concierges and the like.

“What gets measured has economic value and what gets measured gets managed better,” says Madgavkar.