File photo
“All the advances we made [are] in terms of equality [but] now so many women are going to end up back in their homes,” Laura Baena, the Spanish gender activist/campaigner has said.
“We’re going to be the big losers in this [novel Coronavirus] crisis.”
She was speaking to The Guardian of the UK on 29 May, about a petition launched by Yo No Renuncio, a social movement group.
“The messages I’m getting are desperate,” she added. “The objective right now is survival”.
Her message resonates with many women across the globe.
But how did income disparities for men and women come about?
In an article titled, “The origins of our gender roles” published 11th April 2013 on Aljazeera.com, Alison Booth postulated that the transition from labour-intensive shifting cultivation, which uses hand-held devices such as the hoe and the digging stick to a more capital-intensive plough cultivation required upper-body strength to control the plough.
This supposedly gave men a comparative advantage relative to women, resulting in a division of labour in which men worked in the fields while women specialized in work in and around the home.
A gender-based division of labour then gave rise to a culture which codified women’s place as the home – they became designated “homemakers”.
Women noticed the disparity in education, earnings and how men treated them and began to fight for rights: the right to vote, the right to be brought into the formal workplace.
Successes chalked in shaking off the tenterhooks of the “homemaker” then paved the way for fights for shared responsibilities and equal pay as women flooded the workforce.
The Institute for Women’s Policy Research reported that analysis of women’s and men’s earnings over 15 years found that women made just half (49 per cent) of what men earned.
Furthermore, if change continues at the same slow pace as it has been for the past fifty years, it will take 40 years—or until 2059—for women to finally reach pay parity.
For women of colour, the rate of change is even slower: Hispanic women will have to wait until 2224 and African American women will wait until 2130 for equal pay.
In Ghana, where majority of women have always been “homemakers”, and illiteracy is about 85 per cent, emancipation will certainly take not less than the projected figures for Hispanic and African American Women – at least 110 years!
Awumbila Mariama in “Gender equality and poverty in Ghana: implications for poverty reduction strategies” delineated that women make up 43.1% of the “economically active population in Ghana”, the majority working in the informal sector particularly, “in food crop farming yet women only accounted for 26.1% of farm owners or managers”.
In crop farming, the majority of women work in weeding, planting, and selling food crops according to several other sources.
Outside of farming, women employees typically work for low wages in the informal sector, but they control the retail trade and cooked food trading without question.
The job loss effects of the pandemic may therefore just pass such workers by though they may never have any so-called glass ceiling to break, ever.
The current COVID-19 setback threatens to erode all the successes chalked by women over the centuries, to avoid being labelled “home makers” and then being confined to the home.
In the bid to battle the pandemic, non-essential workers are forced to work from home whiles schools are also under lock and key.
The situation is, however, affecting males and females unequally.
The burdens of the home office and home schooling together with additional household duties and extra cooking is being unequally carried by women.
Thus, women are “back in the habit” – into their traditional roles in the home which they will struggle to shake off once the pandemic is over.
A study carried out for the Oireachtas (the Irish legislature), concluded that women have less time to carry out paid work from home compared to men due to the closure of schools and nurseries.
It concluded that a “likely immediate consequence” of the situation was that “women’s productivity in employment will suffer more than men’s.”
Longer-term, it said women could expect “potentially fewer economic opportunities … and a wider gender remuneration gap.”
In deciding on keeping their jobs, women are now torn between resorting to elderly parents as nannies despite the health risks involved or leaving their children at home to go earn a living.
Feedback; ato@writersghana.com or contact Lilly on 057 867 3383; Instagram, @lil_lillyaa; LinkedIn, Lilly Adjei; WhatsApp 057 867 3383.
Writers and Shakespeares Ghana Limited exist to be a moral and intellectual guide to the best practice of PR and integrated communications around the world, beginning with Ghana.
