Women have experienced an interesting couple of years with the rise of the #Metoo Movement, a new push for feminism, the growing reach of the women’s movement, the Pandemic, and a continuous fight for equity.
Women have been pushing and making strides in many directions, from discussing everyday experiences of what it means to be a woman to the White House with the first female Vice President. An uncertain future may now threaten these growth marks in the United States and around the world.
As the pandemic continues and vaccines are starting to be administered, people are taking stock of everything that happened in 2020. While 2020 seemed like a year that dragged on and on, 2021 is moving rapidly, with over 2.5 million people globally losing their lives to Covid-19. The aftermath is only beginning to take shape. Every person on the planet has been affected, and women have carried the brunt load while balancing work and family.
Looking through your own neighborhood and maybe even your own household, you will notice women running around cooking meals, helping with schoolwork, hosting online staff meetings, cleaning the house, taking care of a sick grandpa, trying to show love to a husband or partner, and running themselves ragged. In many households, women are the hub of all the caretaking needs to keep a family running. Since the last century, women have been given and taken on the role of co-breadwinner or breadwinner.
Even before the pandemic, women had much on their plate either by having traditional societal roles placed upon them or working harder to combat gender discrimination. With so much going on and being a woman myself, I wondered two things; how are these women doing it, and how are these women doing?
To find out some answers to my questions, I reached out to Sharmili Majmudar, Executive Vice President of Policy and Organizational Impact at Women Employed, an advocacy organization for women in the workplace. The organization, since 1973, works with individuals, employers, educators, and policymakers to address the challenges women face in their jobs every day and to ensure all women can attain the skills they need for the jobs they want.
Ms. Majmudar is a strategic leader committed to advancing gender equity and social justice. She is passionate about women’s rights and access to economic stability and has a heart for helping women.
My Interview with Sharmili Majmudar
During the pandemic, women have been affected in many ways. Can you pick the top three that we should be the most concerned about?
Certainly, one of the things making the headlines that we are particularly concerned about is women's unemployment. The number of jobs being lost by women, losing the gains in women's attachment to the workforce. The potential losses are related to the gender wage gap and women's unemployment, hitting women hard overall. Women were in unpaid or underpaid roles, particularly Black and Latinx women. The other thing that would make the top three is that women are really on the front lines of responding to covid-19. Women are more likely to be doing unpaid care work at home. And then, even for the women working from home, they are responsible for a disproportionate amount of household labor and caretaking.
In supporting Ms. Majmudar’s concerns, a new analysis from the National Women’s Law Center reported that nearly 2.2 million women left the labor force between February and October due to the pandemic.
What do employers need to do to assist women during this crisis?
Understanding that we are not in normal circumstances and that women need to be given space and grace. Employers need to ensure that they are paying full and fair wages and quality benefits. This is critical because of how women have traditionally faced a wage gap and other types of inequalities. We need to create a robust care infrastructure and strong workplace protections.
One of the issues that we have is that the childcare system and then the overall care infrastructure in the United States has not been invested in. Childcare workers and care providers' value is not being compensated. Childcare has been severely underfunded. It means that childcare providers have razor-thin margins and means that childcare workers face low pay and minimal benefits, which means that many families do not have access to affordable quality care. The United States is an outlier when it comes to how we think about caregiving.
Employers could do things like provide childcare credit. There might be options to provide childcare on-site, providing flexible schedules driven by employees, not by the employer, and really thinking about whether there's flexibility both in work and in the schedule. Those are all things that employers can do.
The majority of childcare usually falls on women; how can women cope and be successful during this time of isolation?
I think overall; we devalue caregiving. When we devalue caregiving, we also devalue caregivers, and those are predominantly women. So, whether you are looking at unpaid care or paid care, we do not offer work family-friendly policies, and we do not ensure that the people who are providing caregiving are supported in doing so. Many women are faced with being in the position of caring for children and caring for their household and then caring for elders and their families.
In many ways, we never even have an accurate vision of who the worker truly is. Workplaces are designed around men who are the sole breadwinners in the household who do not have caregiving responsibilities, and that isn’t the world we live in today. Huge percentages of women are either co-breadwinner or primary breadwinners in their household.
In fact, Majmudar points out commonly held beliefs in society about women; according to a Pew Research report called Gender and Caregiving, 53% of people say that women are better at caregiving, and about half say American society values the contributions men make at work more than the contributions they make at home.
Are employers taking advantage of women during this economic downturn and pandemic?
I think women are coping as best they can, and society needs to ensure that they do not have to cope. That they can find solid footing and can thrive. We need to do better as a society, as a government, as an institution on supporting women.
I think that there are many ways we are still taking for granted the labor of women in low-paid jobs and essential roles. We have talked about appreciating what essential workers do, recognizing the importance of what they do. Our policies and benefits do not match that rhetoric.
In that sense, I think the women and primarily women of color represented in those roles are being taken advantage of. They are being told that their heroes, on the one hand, but are not being treated like heroes in terms of how they are compensated, in terms of what benefits they have access to, including things like paid leave, or in terms of what childcare is accessible and affordable for them.
Is the gender wage gap widening or closing?
So there is a huge concern that the wage gap will widen when women are forced out of the workforce and then come back to it. They often cannot command the same earnings as they could before. The wage Gap already was still not closing at any speed, and women of color were being left even further behind.
You often hear about the 82 cents on the dollar on the average for the wage gap. When you start talking about women of color, Latina women, for example, are paid just a little over 50 cents on the dollar for every dollar paid to a white non-Hispanic, man. We had a situation going into the pandemic that already was deeply unequal.
There is a real worry about that 82 cents. For example, what that means on an average in a year is over $10,000, and for some women, over a 40-year career, it can add up to over a million dollars in lost wages. I think we can all understand that those earnings would have been critical to helping women help their families do things like buy a home, get a car, help pay for their education or their child's education, or help them save for retirement. So many economical choices become restricted by the existence of the gender wage gap. And without us taking proactive and intentional action, the gap will continue. The gap has only closed four cents in 10 years. So we really have an issue in terms of the wage gap, and the current circumstances are threatening to make that even more problematic.
In agreement with Majmudar’s evidence, in a 2014 Pew Research Center survey, 77% of women and 63% of men said this country needs to continue making changes to give men and women equality in the workplace.
Family caregiving responsibilities, particularly motherhood, can lead to interruptions in women's career paths and can have an impact on long-term earnings. In a 2013 survey, women were more likely than men to say they had taken breaks from their careers to care for their family. Roughly four-in-ten mothers said that at some point in their work-life, they had taken a significant amount of time off (39%) or reduced their work hours (42%) to care for a child or other family member.
Mothers were also nearly twice as likely as fathers to say taking time off had hurt their job or career. Among those who took leave from work in the past two years following their child's birth or adoption, 25% of women said this had a negative impact at work.
What’s the New Women’s Movement?
Feminist movements have developed. We have found them becoming more complex, and there is no single defining characteristic of modern feminism. Many women have seen an expansion of how we think about and talk about gender itself. Still, many of the issues we faced in earlier iterations of the feminist movement continue to be issues for us today. For example, whether we center on the experiences of women of color and particularly black and Latinx women, how we define women and inclusion. Also, how we talk about gender to understand what a woman's place is and limitations on what kind of work she should be doing, how much she can contribute to society through her work, how her contributions via providing care to communities and household and family is valued.
I think some of the same battles continue, and some of them have evolved. I think voting rights is another one, and women winning the right to vote. We continue to see issues around voter suppression, particularly of voters of color.
Low-Income Women
If we think back to the early 90s, Anita Hill was a critical figure in lifting up women's workplace experience around issues of sexual harassment and how it plays out in different workplaces.
One example I can point to is connected to economic security, the experience of making sub-minimal wages.
Servers at restaurants, for example, and many people do not know that a sub-minimum wage even exists; these people are being paid less than the minimum wage with the expectation that the tips that they earn will make up the difference.
The making up difference problem first puts them at risk economically and at particular risk for discrimination and harassment. Our partners at One Fair Wage recently put out a disturbing report about the experience. Harassment towards restaurant servers being told that they needed to take off their masks for the patron to decide how much to tip them. They were also facing threats related to telling patrons that they needed to wear their masks.
Then on top of that, they were also experiencing a significant decline in tips. So, more harassment, fewer tips, and a risk of harm as well. All of this comes together and puts these women who earn sub-minimum wages at an intersection of risks that they should not have to figure out. We see this issue of harassment playing out differently in the headlines versus experiencing it on a day-to-day basis.
Hope for the Future?
I see a lot of hope in the work done to raise, amplify, and illuminate women's experiences in the workplace. I think the fact that we're talking about essential workers paid leave and about childcare are all bright spots.
We are seeing things like raising the federal minimum wage in the federal legislation right now being considered. We have also seen a push for increasing the paid leave options by increasing the investment in childcare and sharing that local and state governments are invested in increasing stimulus check eligibility for unemployment insurance.
It is important to ensure that families can weather this storm. In addition, mutual aid groups see people in the community reach out to one another to support their neighbors. And this is the best of who we are. We have to translate those individual gestures into an individual sense or the localized sense of community.
Many women already carried somewhat invisibly a little bit more of the caretaking load, and it became visible with the option of working from home. I think we have been able to demonstrate that it's possible and that it will be helpful for many people to work remotely or work hybrid.
I think those are the positives. I was saying earlier; I think we really illuminated the experience of women, working parents, caregivers and were talking about it. We recognize that home and work are not separate spheres of our lives.
We also see things like the positive impact of public policy. Several research pieces have shown that if the workplace had paid sick leave, there was reduced covid-19 transmission. We need to think about those things as intertwined. It is our community's health and well-being when we are talking about things like paid leave. We have a real opportunity to make a change that will impact millions of people in Illinois alone. One of the things we're doing is advocating for paid sick leave for all working people in the state of Illinois.
What does it mean to be a woman in 2021?
I think that being a woman means different things and depends on a lot of these things discussed. We have the opportunity to think of this experience as a way of creating more solidarity and creating an economy that is not just centered on an outdated vision of what a worker is. I think being a woman is being on the threshold of change.
Women Employed
Women Employed is a nonprofit advocacy organization based in Chicago, Illinois. Founded in 1973, Women Employed's mission is to improve women's economic status and remove barriers to economic equity. If you would like to help visit the Women Employed Action Center online.
Find out more at: https://womenemployed.org/
About the Author
Annmarie Hylton-Schaub, Head Marketing Strategist and Content Developer at Project Good Work a boutique marketing group focused on helping individuals who want to launch social impact projects, charities, and change-making initiatives. The marketing group works to develop branding, marketing strategy, and content to connect clients with the people who believe what they believe so that their project and business can thrive.
If you have a passion for an unserved community, a social justice problem, or simply want to change minds contact Project Good Work at ProjectGood.Work to start your project of change today.