WHILE it is generally recognised that the persisting coronavirus pandemic in the world has had a debilitating and devastating effect on women, reducing gains already made in women empowerment, exposing women more to sexual and gender-based violence and leading to more women leaving employment and jobs while those who are employed have had the additional burden of domestic duties and childcare with corresponding amount of stress, it is ironical that some of the consequences of the pandemic have also benefited some women, even if a small cohort of them. We make allusion here to the remote and virtual work that became the order of the day on account of the lockdowns occasioned by the pandemic. Flexible work schedule and working from home used to be no go areas for recruiters and major companies and businesses, but according to Neha Bagaria, the founder of online jobs platform, JobsForHer, this has positively changed as the pandemic forced everybody to shift to remote and virtual work, saying, ‘it really took the pandemic to gain an acceptance for work from home roles.’
Incidentally, the people that have traditionally been at home, forced to be at home really, have been women, such that the shift to remote work and working from home met them as experts in the system. Whereas many men were traumatized by the demand to work from home, women naturally fitted into the role given that they had always been at home anyway and one of the demands they had been making to enable them to get more involved in the employment market was for employers to consider flexible work schedule and the possibility of remote work and working from home. It was, therefore, natural that women would take advantage of this shift in the employment market to remote work and working from home to demonstrate their competencies and the readiness to get engaged if given the right opportunities and incentives and environment. In this regard, a recent survey in India found that educated women in middle-to-senior positions have seen job opportunities rise in the last year, positing that in more than 300 companies surveyed in India, women now account ‘for 43 per cent of middle-senior management roles in 2020, a jump of more than 20 percentage points from the previous year.’
Indeed, it is said that in India, according to Aditya Mishra, founder of Ciel HR Services, ‘in 2021, the number of women actively exploring job opportunities has gone up by 89 percent vis-a-vis 2020 … (while) companies across sectors have gone on to hire 21 percent more women than the previous year.’ The implication here being that this growth in job opportunities and recruitment of women in India signaled by the shift to remote work and working from home gives an insight to the policies that might work should we, as a world and human societies, want to be concerned with and encourage gender diversity in the work place. In any case, we all know that women are not represented enough in the work place because of the impediments and obstacles in their way. We know that in spite of the fact that women are a lot more educated than before, there are still factors such as restrictive cultural norms and office harassment that are militating against and preventing them from taking their rightful place in the employment market. And these are outside of the biases and negative preferences of mainly men recruiters who are wont to loathe employing women while loading the work place essentially with men recruits.
Which is why there has always been the need for government and societal intervention to ensure that women are given opportunities in the job market, such as policies stipulating affirmative action on the minimum percentage of women that should be in the employment roll to achieve and maintain diversity in the work place and even in the boards of companies and businesses. This especially as we have come to know that companies and businesses with such staff diversity perform better to the benefit of the owners and the entire society. When we, therefore, have a situation in which companies and businesses and their recruiters on their own start engaging women into their work force, it means thst we have a win-win situation for all concerned and the society, such that incorporating remote work and working from home into the regular panoply of employment consideration should be a way of encouraging more diversity in the work place. We at least have a situation in which the pandemic has shown that remote work could be just as effective as being in the office.
Yet, it has to be stated that while adopting the hybrid work models now and in the aftermath of the coronavirus pandemic should and would help to see an increase in the engagement of women at the middle-senior management level of companies and businesses and even at government establishments, this would not be enough to help ensure the placement of women at the top management level of active work life. As Ashutosh Khanna, a senior client partner at management consulting firm, Korn Kerry, puts it, “nobody is hiring a CEO by saying, ‘Never come to my main office.’’ We, therefore, have to do more than relying on the pandemic to show the way in terms of the adoption of remote work and working from home to institute other policies and incentives that would make it possible for more women to want to be engaged in the employment market. Evidently many companies and businesses would return to full office engagement after the pandemic with this signaling perhaps a further loss of employment by women.
There is the need, as such, for a robust engagement with overcoming the obstacles and impediments in the way of full job placement and employment of women at all levels, building on the current unexpected insight provided by the pandemic. The only way to realise the full benefits of diversity in the workplace is to ensure that women are truly made comfortable to participate fully in the employment market. And this would mean to continue to keep the superiority of diversity in the work place in mind at all times.
- Yakubu is of the Department of Communication and Language Arts, University of Ibadan.
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