The COVID-19 pandemic is widely seen as a potential turning point after which almost everything could be different.
Margaret MacMillan, the eminent historian, has compared this crisis to the French and Russian revolutions – points at which the river of history changed course.
And it’s almost certain that as a result of this crisis there will be big changes: expectations of the state’s ability to look after its citizens will be higher; the public and financial markets may be more accepting of government borrowing; government will be expected to manage the labour market to provide a minimum level of security for vulnerable workers. It will be a far cry from the free-market, small state policies of the 1980s and 1990s.
Yet it is far from obvious that this crisis, even one that is deep and severe, will lead to a turning point of the kind that MacMillan suggests.
The most recent example of a crisis whose bark was worse than its bite was the financial crash of 2008. Many predicted it would be a turning point given the deep dysfunctions in financial capitalism it laid bare. Yet through a combination of quantitative easing, financial support for the banks and re-regulation, the financial system recovered. The wider economic recovery created millions of jobs (albeit many low paid and insecure), profits rose and stock markets went on an extraordinary bull run. What could have been a turning point ended up being a period of extreme turbulence that people were happy to have left behind. The financial institutions at the heart of the crisis were too important, powerful and entrenched to be fundamentally disrupted.
COVID-19 might prove similar if we emerge from the pandemic with as much continuity as change. Many systems, including banking, financial markets and food production, have carried on working much as they ever did. There is pent-up desire to get back to activities once regarded as normal: eating out; socialising with friends; weddings; holidays; visits to the cinema, concerts, festivals and football matches.
A crisis only becomes a turning point when it becomes a ‘critical juncture’ – one of those rare moments when institutions, norms and rules are unfixed, new possibilities for future development open up, new ideas gain currency and social and political forces emerge to take them forward. The choices made in those moments can have lasting effects on how society develops. The US New Deal in response to the Great Depression and the creation of the British welfare state after the Second World War were both critical junctures.
The plague of Florence in 1348, as described in Boccaccio’s Decameron (‘Il decameron’). Etching by L. Sabatelli. Image courtesy of the Wellcome Collection
The Black Death created a critical juncture in the 14th century because the death toll produced such a labour shortage that the status quo could not be restored. Peasants in some parts of Western Europe were able to shake the foundations of the feudal order, winning greater economic and political freedoms. In much of Eastern Europe however, landowners responded by becoming more authoritarian, imposing an intensified serfdom. The two parts of Europe developed in very different ways thereafter. Western European societies became more broadly based, inclusive and productive; Eastern European economies became even more extractive and unequal, ruled over by an implacable feudal elite.
That story told by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson in Why Nations Fail explains the role of the plague this way: “The Black Death is a vivid example of a critical juncture, a major event or confluence of factors disrupting the existing economic or political balance in society. A critical juncture is a double-edged sword that can cause a sharp turn in the trajectory of a nation.” But as the Black Death showed, that turn could go in any number of directions depending on the way the forces at play amplify what can be small differences in the institutions of different societies.
A critical juncture is a relatively short period of time when a broader than normal range of options is open to society. The choices made between those options, by people and organisations with the power to make the choices, will have a significant, long-term impact on how society develops. Is what we are going through now what the philosopher Gershom Scholem called a ‘plastic hour’ when obdurate systems resistant to change suddenly have no option but to open up?
A crisis can create transformative change in four ways. All four are at work in the COVID-19 crisis. It remains to be seen whether these four will make this a critical juncture.
A crisis can rapidly accelerate changes already underway as society suddenly goes much faster along the path it was already on.
The most obvious example of acceleration is the rapid spread of digital services, not only for shopping but also for work and public services. The British government has been able to channel furlough payments to millions of employees and loans to thousands of businesses, thanks to digital service platforms that have been a decade in their development. The crisis has propelled a step change in digital services around the world. Indonesia is just one place where a mobile phone based primary health care system has been scaled rapidly. What was once niche has become mainstream.
The acceleration of digitalisation will have knock-on effects. Home will become even more important for people as a place from which to work and shop. That may change the geography, patterns and routines of work: suburbs and small towns with good internet connections may become more attractive. By accelerating digitalisation, societies will have different options for how they organise themselves. Looking back, historians may pinpoint the crisis as the time when the potential of digital services to radically transform where and how we work were made real.
A crisis can also create a dead end. The path comes to an abrupt halt; in the worst case, it goes over a cliff. That shock forces people to change how they work and live, as old models are no longer viable. Even if it’s not obvious what new models will take their place it is clear that people need to explore and experiment to find them. Historians will look back and identify this crisis as the moment when some old systems finally ran out of road.
For some industries, the dead end has been looming: high streets and the retailers still on them. The crisis has merely brought forward the end. In other cases, the discontinuity has been much more sudden and shocking because it was so unexpected. Entire industries that had viable business models have been brought to their knees by the need for social distancing: among them hospitality and tourism, cultural and creative industries which depend on live performance for audiences. Some of these industries may snap back into shape once effective vaccines have been distributed widely enough and people can eat in restaurants, gather for weddings, board planes and go to concerts. Yet, even so, the crisis will leave lasting scars. Some of the theatres and restaurants that have closed will not reopen. Some consumers jolted out of old habits may permanently revise their behaviour, especially in the light of climate change, which might mean people flying less. In many poor communities high streets could become deserted.
Like the pits, steel works, car factories and docks that closed in the midst of deep recession, never to reopen, at least some of the restaurants, shops and cultural venues closed by COVID-19 may never return. The geography of that impact is likely to be highly uneven.
What do you do when you reach an unexpected dead end? You trace your steps to take forks in the road you previously ignored. That may be what will happen if the crisis brings about a flight from large cities and less commuting, in favour of suburbs and provincial towns where local services, high streets and spaces, like libraries and parks, might fill up again, bringing with it a provincial renaissance.
When society accelerates along one path, while another comes to an abrupt dead end, then society’s arc of development shifts. A crisis then becomes a turning point.
A crisis becomes a turning point when society changes the path it is on. Critical junctures are forks in the road, or, more radical still, a leap to a completely different path, which comes about in part through conscious, deliberate, collective choice.
Regional economies often have to go through such shifts, according to Bjorn Asheim, one of Europe’s leading scholars of regional economic development. Regional economies have a strong tendency to extend the path they are already on, refining existing knowledge and reinforcing existing relationships, serving existing markets with familiar products. However, to create new opportunities for growth, regional economies have to leap to a new path – Asheim calls it a long jump – which requires exploring new markets, engaging with unfamiliar knowledge and making new relationships. Out of all of that a new way forward emerges. Long jumping is a risky business. The shock of a crisis may yet force us to become long jumpers, to find a new path.
The most obvious example of such a long jump is the remaking of our approach to work. Enforced and prolonged distance working is making many employees and employers reassess the importance of having everyone in the office all of the time – or even having an office at all. Home is becoming a workplace for many more people. Many offices, and so the services that cluster around them, will never be the same. Organisations and management hierarchies will be reshaped; people may even be forced to rethink what an organisation is.
At the same time as opening up these opportunities to work differently, many people will find some forms of work much harder to sustain: the frontline staff who have continued throughout the pandemic; the people laid off from jobs in hospitality. Just as digitalisation and automation accelerates, eliminating many routine jobs, so job creation will slow in sectors such as hospitality and services (where it was such an economic lifesaver after 2008). The consequent rise in unemployment among low-skilled workers will likely force the government to sustain a more activist approach to managing the labour market, quite possibly borrowing from European welfare systems that subsidise wages to keep people in jobs for as long as possible.
New models of work will emerge from the crisis and, with that, perhaps a new social safety net offering workers a job guarantee and a measure of security married to flexibility. Ideas for reshaping the labour market figure prominently in the policy platform Joe Biden’s campaigned on in the US presidential election, including a higher minimum wage; three million new jobs in education, childcare and elderly care, with better pay and benefits. Democrats are pushing for more universal benefits for sick pay and family leave. Experiments with universal basic income are becoming practical realities in some places.
What started as a health crisis could leave its lasting mark by creating a new way for society to organise work, one which would have seemed a pipe dream even in 2019. That would be a turning point: a shift onto a new path.
The final option is that the crisis might create so many opportunities for change, on so many different fronts, that rather than creating a clear turning point – a choice between one path and another – it becomes more akin to a large roundabout, with many different exits as society spins around searching for a way out. That may be the best description of the state we are in now, a kind of vortex in which everything moves very fast but stays roughly in the same place because for the moment at least we are going round in circles.
The possibilities are endless. Crisis could lead to: the spread of digitalisation of public and private services; a new economic role in managing work for a larger state with a more relaxed approach to borrowing; a reformed system of social care, in the wake of the toll on older people and their carers; something like a universal work and income guarantee for young people; new alliances between local government and mutual aid groups in civil society; a digitally enabled primary health system, including track and trace technology as standard; a new society-wide commitment to tackle structural racial inequality; a recovery with a Green New Deal at its heart; a return to normality circa 2019. Precisely because it reaches so deep and wide, this crisis may create so many different possibilities that nothing as coherent as a single ‘turning point’ emerges. Instead different parts of society take different exits scattering in different directions pursuing fractured experimentation.
That fragmentation may be the most plausible outcome because there are as yet no clear political and economic actors with enough support to take society in one direction or another. The nationalist and populist wave may have reached its peak. Everyday radicalism, experimenting with new policies, organisations and institutions, may be rising. New coalitions may be forming on the horizon as we embark on a green transition. But as yet there is nothing coherent enough to take society in a definitive direction. It will depend on what coalitions form around which programmes in the next year or so.
These are the four ways in which a crisis can generate lasting, potentially transformative change: accelerator, dead-end, turning point and roundabout. This crisis clearly has the potential to be a critical juncture but that depends on which exit we take from the roundabout. And that will depend on who gets to tell the story of the crisis, how we make sense of it all.
That is the conclusion Mark Blyth comes to in his study of such moments in Great Transformations: Economic Ideas and Political Change in the Twentieth Century. According to Blyth, a professor of international political science at Brown University in the US, a crisis becomes a turning point when its story gets told in a certain way which determines what an adequate response looks like.
The first is whether the crisis is seen as an external threat or an internal challenge. Those in power, seeking to justify their actions, will want to present COVID-19 primarily as a global pandemic: an external threat of unprecedented scale. Their challengers will have to persuade people it was also an internal challenge, exposing deep seated weaknesses and failings. Perhaps Joe Biden’s victory also marks a tilt in favour of the latter account.
The second contrast is whether we are all in this together or whether the crisis has exposed and deepened structural social inequalities that need to be tackled. Do we bask in the warm glow of collective goodwill or face the hard and costly reality of inequality?
The alternative narrative is more difficult to convey. The pandemic exposes the limits of individualism; responding to it depends on solidarity and fellow feeling. One person’s health depends on the health of others. Yet that will not yield an agenda for reform unless we also address the growing evidence that we are not in this together, that the economic and health burdens are unequally shared across class, race and age. The post-war welfare state emerged from the fellow feeling of the war but also a recognition of the unequal burdens, carried by older people and women. It was both an expression of solidarity and a critique of unacceptable inequality.
Challengers will need to get this balance right to create a credible narrative. The uneven impact of the economic crisis, the unemployment and business closures that will follow the end of the pandemic, could provide the basis for such a narrative.
Milton Friedman, the intellectual inspiration for the free market policies of Ronald Regan and Margaret Thatcher once wrote: “Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions taken depend on the ideas lying around. That I believe is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.”
The problem is not a lack of ideas. Many of the ideas that might provide the ingredients for a critical juncture are lying around: a version of universal basic income, combined with a Green New Deal, greater local and deliberative democracy and more responsible corporations to create an economy organised around an ethic of care, regeneration and stewardship rather than money, profits and growth.
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Steve Ovett, the famous British middle-distance athlete, won the 800-metres gold medal at the Moscow Olympics of 1980. Just a few days later, he was about to win a 5,000-metres race at London’s Crystal Palace. Known for his burst of acceleration on the home stretch, he had supreme confidence in his ability to out-sprint rivals. With the final 100 metres remaining,
[wptelegram-join-channel link=”https://t.me/s/upsctree” text=”Join @upsctree on Telegram”]Ovett waved to the crowd and raised a hand in triumph. But he had celebrated a bit too early. At the finishing line, Ireland’s John Treacy edged past Ovett. For those few moments, Ovett had lost his sense of reality and ignored the possibility of a negative event.
This analogy works well for the India story and our policy failures , including during the ongoing covid pandemic. While we have never been as well prepared or had significant successes in terms of growth stability as Ovett did in his illustrious running career, we tend to celebrate too early. Indeed, we have done so many times before.
It is as if we’re convinced that India is destined for greater heights, come what may, and so we never run through the finish line. Do we and our policymakers suffer from a collective optimism bias, which, as the Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman once wrote, “may well be the most significant of the cognitive biases”? The optimism bias arises from mistaken beliefs which form expectations that are better than the reality. It makes us underestimate chances of a negative outcome and ignore warnings repeatedly.
The Indian economy had a dream run for five years from 2003-04 to 2007-08, with an average annual growth rate of around 9%. Many believed that India was on its way to clocking consistent double-digit growth and comparisons with China were rife. It was conveniently overlooked that this output expansion had come mainly came from a few sectors: automobiles, telecom and business services.
Indians were made to believe that we could sprint without high-quality education, healthcare, infrastructure or banking sectors, which form the backbone of any stable economy. The plan was to build them as we went along, but then in the euphoria of short-term success, it got lost.
India’s exports of goods grew from $20 billion in 1990-91 to over $310 billion in 2019-20. Looking at these absolute figures it would seem as if India has arrived on the world stage. However, India’s share of global trade has moved up only marginally. Even now, the country accounts for less than 2% of the world’s goods exports.
More importantly, hidden behind this performance was the role played by one sector that should have never made it to India’s list of exports—refined petroleum. The share of refined petroleum exports in India’s goods exports increased from 1.4% in 1996-97 to over 18% in 2011-12.
An import-intensive sector with low labour intensity, exports of refined petroleum zoomed because of the then policy regime of a retail price ceiling on petroleum products in the domestic market. While we have done well in the export of services, our share is still less than 4% of world exports.
India seemed to emerge from the 2008 global financial crisis relatively unscathed. But, a temporary demand push had played a role in the revival—the incomes of many households, both rural and urban, had shot up. Fiscal stimulus to the rural economy and implementation of the Sixth Pay Commission scales had led to the salaries of around 20% of organized-sector employees jumping up. We celebrated, but once again, neither did we resolve the crisis brewing elsewhere in India’s banking sector, nor did we improve our capacity for healthcare or quality education.
Employment saw little economy-wide growth in our boom years. Manufacturing jobs, if anything, shrank. But we continued to celebrate. Youth flocked to low-productivity service-sector jobs, such as those in hotels and restaurants, security and other services. The dependence on such jobs on one hand and high-skilled services on the other was bound to make Indian society more unequal.
And then, there is agriculture, an elephant in the room. If and when farm-sector reforms get implemented, celebrations would once again be premature. The vast majority of India’s farmers have small plots of land, and though these farms are at least as productive as larger ones, net absolute incomes from small plots can only be meagre.
A further rise in farm productivity and consequent increase in supply, if not matched by a demand rise, especially with access to export markets, would result in downward pressure on market prices for farm produce and a further decline in the net incomes of small farmers.
We should learn from what John Treacy did right. He didn’t give up, and pushed for the finish line like it was his only chance at winning. Treacy had years of long-distance practice. The same goes for our economy. A long grind is required to build up its base before we can win and celebrate. And Ovett did not blame anyone for his loss. We play the blame game. Everyone else, right from China and the US to ‘greedy corporates’, seems to be responsible for our failures.
We have lowered absolute poverty levels and had technology-based successes like Aadhaar and digital access to public services. But there are no short cuts to good quality and adequate healthcare and education services. We must remain optimistic but stay firmly away from the optimism bias.
In the end, it is not about how we start, but how we finish. The disastrous second wave of covid and our inability to manage it is a ghastly reminder of this fact.
On March 31, the World Economic Forum (WEF) released its annual Gender Gap Report 2021. The Global Gender Gap report is an annual report released by the WEF. The gender gap is the difference between women and men as reflected in social, political, intellectual, cultural, or economic attainments or attitudes. The gap between men and women across health, education, politics, and economics widened for the first time since records began in 2006.
[wptelegram-join-channel link=”https://t.me/s/upsctree” text=”Join @upsctree on Telegram”]No need to remember all the data, only pick out few important ones to use in your answers.
The Global gender gap index aims to measure this gap in four key areas : health, education, economics, and politics. It surveys economies to measure gender disparity by collating and analyzing data that fall under four indices : economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, health and survival, and political empowerment.
The 2021 Global Gender Gap Index benchmarks 156 countries on their progress towards gender parity. The index aims to serve as a compass to track progress on relative gaps between women and men in health, education, economy, and politics.
Although no country has achieved full gender parity, the top two countries (Iceland and Finland) have closed at least 85% of their gap, and the remaining seven countries (Lithuania, Namibia, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Rwanda, and Ireland) have closed at least 80% of their gap. Geographically, the global top 10 continues to be dominated by Nordic countries, with —Iceland, Norway, Finland, and Sweden—in the top five.
The top 10 is completed by one country from Asia Pacific (New Zealand 4th), two Sub-Saharan countries (Namibia, 6th and Rwanda, 7th, one country from Eastern Europe (the new entrant to the top 10, Lithuania, 8th), and another two Western European countries (Ireland, 9th, and Switzerland, 10th, another country in the top-10 for the first time).There is a relatively equitable distribution of available income, resources, and opportunities for men and women in these countries. The tremendous gender gaps are identified primarily in the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia.
Here, we can discuss the overall global gender gap scores across the index’s four main components : Economic Participation and Opportunity, Educational Attainment, Health and Survival, and Political Empowerment.
The indicators of the four main components are
(1) Economic Participation and Opportunity:
o Labour force participation rate,
o wage equality for similar work,
o estimated earned income,
o Legislators, senior officials, and managers,
o Professional and technical workers.
(2) Educational Attainment:
o Literacy rate (%)
o Enrollment in primary education (%)
o Enrollment in secondary education (%)
o Enrollment in tertiary education (%).
(3) Health and Survival:
o Sex ratio at birth (%)
o Healthy life expectancy (years).
(4) Political Empowerment:
o Women in Parliament (%)
o Women in Ministerial positions (%)
o Years with a female head of State (last 50 years)
o The share of tenure years.
The objective is to shed light on which factors are driving the overall average decline in the global gender gap score. The analysis results show that this year’s decline is mainly caused by a reversal in performance on the Political Empowerment gap.
Global Trends and Outcomes:
– Globally, this year, i.e., 2021, the average distance completed to gender parity gap is 68% (This means that the remaining gender gap to close stands at 32%) a step back compared to 2020 (-0.6 percentage points). These figures are mainly driven by a decline in the performance of large countries. On its current trajectory, it will now take 135.6 years to close the gender gap worldwide.
– The gender gap in Political Empowerment remains the largest of the four gaps tracked, with only 22% closed to date, having further widened since the 2020 edition of the report by 2.4 percentage points. Across the 156 countries covered by the index, women represent only 26.1% of some 35,500 Parliament seats and 22.6% of over 3,400 Ministers worldwide. In 81 countries, there has never been a woman head of State as of January 15, 2021. At the current rate of progress, the World Economic Forum estimates that it will take 145.5 years to attain gender parity in politics.
– The gender gap in Economic Participation and Opportunity remains the second-largest of the four key gaps tracked by the index. According to this year’s index results, 58% of this gap has been closed so far. The gap has seen marginal improvement since the 2020 edition of the report, and as a result, we estimate that it will take another 267.6 years to close.
– Gender gaps in Educational Attainment and Health and Survival are nearly closed. In Educational Attainment, 95% of this gender gap has been closed globally, with 37 countries already attaining gender parity. However, the ‘last mile’ of progress is proceeding slowly. The index estimates that it will take another 14.2 years to close this gap on its current trajectory completely.
In Health and Survival, 96% of this gender gap has been closed, registering a marginal decline since last year (not due to COVID-19), and the time to close this gap remains undefined. For both education and health, while progress is higher than economy and politics in the global data, there are important future implications of disruptions due to the pandemic and continued variations in quality across income, geography, race, and ethnicity.
India-Specific Findings:
India had slipped 28 spots to rank 140 out of the 156 countries covered. The pandemic causing a disproportionate impact on women jeopardizes rolling back the little progress made in the last decades-forcing more women to drop off the workforce and leaving them vulnerable to domestic violence.
India’s poor performance on the Global Gender Gap report card hints at a serious wake-up call and learning lessons from the Nordic region for the Government and policy makers.
Within the 156 countries covered, women hold only 26 percent of Parliamentary seats and 22 percent of Ministerial positions. India, in some ways, reflects this widening gap, where the number of Ministers declined from 23.1 percent in 2019 to 9.1 percent in 2021. The number of women in Parliament stands low at 14.4 percent. In India, the gender gap has widened to 62.5 %, down from 66.8% the previous year.
It is mainly due to women’s inadequate representation in politics, technical and leadership roles, a decrease in women’s labor force participation rate, poor healthcare, lagging female to male literacy ratio, and income inequality.
The gap is the widest on the political empowerment dimension, with economic participation and opportunity being next in line. However, the gap on educational attainment and health and survival has been practically bridged.
India is the third-worst performer among South Asian countries, with Pakistan and Afghanistan trailing and Bangladesh being at the top. The report states that the country fared the worst in political empowerment, regressing from 23.9% to 9.1%.
Its ranking on the health and survival dimension is among the five worst performers. The economic participation and opportunity gap saw a decline of 3% compared to 2020, while India’s educational attainment front is in the 114th position.
India has deteriorated to 51st place from 18th place in 2020 on political empowerment. Still, it has slipped to 155th position from 150th position in 2020 on health and survival, 151st place in economic participation and opportunity from 149th place, and 114th place for educational attainment from 112th.
In 2020 reports, among the 153 countries studied, India is the only country where the economic gender gap of 64.6% is larger than the political gender gap of 58.9%. In 2021 report, among the 156 countries, the economic gender gap of India is 67.4%, 3.8% gender gap in education, 6.3% gap in health and survival, and 72.4% gender gap in political empowerment. In health and survival, the gender gap of the sex ratio at birth is above 9.1%, and healthy life expectancy is almost the same.
Discrimination against women has also been reflected in Health and Survival subindex statistics. With 93.7% of this gap closed to date, India ranks among the bottom five countries in this subindex. The wide sex ratio at birth gaps is due to the high incidence of gender-based sex-selective practices. Besides, more than one in four women has faced intimate violence in her lifetime.The gender gap in the literacy rate is above 20.1%.
Yet, gender gaps persist in literacy : one-third of women are illiterate (34.2%) than 17.6% of men. In political empowerment, globally, women in Parliament is at 128th position and gender gap of 83.2%, and 90% gap in a Ministerial position. The gap in wages equality for similar work is above 51.8%. On health and survival, four large countries Pakistan, India, Vietnam, and China, fare poorly, with millions of women there not getting the same access to health as men.
The pandemic has only slowed down in its tracks the progress India was making towards achieving gender parity. The country urgently needs to focus on “health and survival,” which points towards a skewed sex ratio because of the high incidence of gender-based sex-selective practices and women’s economic participation. Women’s labour force participation rate and the share of women in technical roles declined in 2020, reducing the estimated earned income of women, one-fifth of men.
Learning from the Nordic region, noteworthy participation of women in politics, institutions, and public life is the catalyst for transformational change. Women need to be equal participants in the labour force to pioneer the societal changes the world needs in this integral period of transition.
Every effort must be directed towards achieving gender parallelism by facilitating women in leadership and decision-making positions. Social protection programmes should be gender-responsive and account for the differential needs of women and girls. Research and scientific literature also provide unequivocal evidence that countries led by women are dealing with the pandemic more effectively than many others.
Gendered inequality, thereby, is a global concern. India should focus on targeted policies and earmarked public and private investments in care and equalized access. Women are not ready to wait for another century for equality. It’s time India accelerates its efforts and fight for an inclusive, equal, global recovery.
India will not fully develop unless both women and men are equally supported to reach their full potential. There are risks, violations, and vulnerabilities women face just because they are women. Most of these risks are directly linked to women’s economic, political, social, and cultural disadvantages in their daily lives. It becomes acute during crises and disasters.
With the prevalence of gender discrimination, and social norms and practices, women become exposed to the possibility of child marriage, teenage pregnancy, child domestic work, poor education and health, sexual abuse, exploitation, and violence. Many of these manifestations will not change unless women are valued more.
[wptelegram-join-channel link=”https://t.me/s/upsctree” text=”Join @upsctree on Telegram”]2021 WEF Global Gender Gap report, which confirmed its 2016 finding of a decline in worldwide progress towards gender parity.
Over 2.8 billion women are legally restricted from having the same choice of jobs as men. As many as 104 countries still have laws preventing women from working in specific jobs, 59 countries have no laws on sexual harassment in the workplace, and it is astonishing that a handful of countries still allow husbands to legally stop their wives from working.
Globally, women’s participation in the labour force is estimated at 63% (as against 94% of men who participate), but India’s is at a dismal 25% or so currently. Most women are in informal and vulnerable employment—domestic help, agriculture, etc—and are always paid less than men.
Recent reports from Assam suggest that women workers in plantations are paid much less than men and never promoted to supervisory roles. The gender wage gap is about 24% globally, and women have lost far more jobs than men during lockdowns.
The problem of gender disparity is compounded by hurdles put up by governments, society and businesses: unequal access to social security schemes, banking services, education, digital services and so on, even as a glass ceiling has kept leadership roles out of women’s reach.
Yes, many governments and businesses had been working on parity before the pandemic struck. But the global gender gap, defined by differences reflected in the social, political, intellectual, cultural and economic attainments or attitudes of men and women, will not narrow in the near future without all major stakeholders working together on a clear agenda—that of economic growth by inclusion.
The WEF report estimates 135 years to close the gap at our current rate of progress based on four pillars: educational attainment, health, economic participation and political empowerment.
India has slipped from rank 112 to 140 in a single year, confirming how hard women were hit by the pandemic. Pakistan and Afghanistan are the only two Asian countries that fared worse.
Here are a few things we must do:
One, frame policies for equal-opportunity employment. Use technology and artificial intelligence to eliminate biases of gender, caste, etc, and select candidates at all levels on merit. Numerous surveys indicate that women in general have a better chance of landing jobs if their gender is not known to recruiters.
Two, foster a culture of gender sensitivity. Take a review of current policies and move from gender-neutral to gender-sensitive. Encourage and insist on diversity and inclusion at all levels, and promote more women internally to leadership roles. Demolish silos to let women grab potential opportunities in hitherto male-dominant roles. Work-from-home has taught us how efficiently women can manage flex-timings and productivity.
Three, deploy corporate social responsibility (CSR) funds for the education and skilling of women and girls at the bottom of the pyramid. CSR allocations to toilet building, the PM-Cares fund and firms’ own trusts could be re-channelled for this.
Four, get more women into research and development (R&D) roles. A study of over 4,000 companies found that more women in R&D jobs resulted in radical innovation. It appears women score far higher than men in championing change. If you seek growth from affordable products and services for low-income groups, women often have the best ideas.
Five, break barriers to allow progress. Cultural and structural issues must be fixed. Unconscious biases and discrimination are rampant even in highly-esteemed organizations. Establish fair and transparent human resource policies.
Six, get involved in local communities to engage them. As Michael Porter said, it is not possible for businesses to sustain long-term shareholder value without ensuring the welfare of the communities they exist in. It is in the best interest of enterprises to engage with local communities to understand and work towards lowering cultural and other barriers in society. It will also help connect with potential customers, employees and special interest groups driving the gender-equity agenda and achieve better diversity.