Women and pandemic recovery

THE persisting coronavirus pandemic in the world has further exposed and heightened the awareness of the discrimination and inequality that women experience and bear in the current largely patriarchal arrangement. The world is waking up to the reality that women have always been treated differently and unequally in a very pervasive and persistent manner across the entire world. It is as if the world is essentially constructed and has been functioning as a patriarchal world, where women and girls are treated as second-class human beings with little or no regard to them and their interests. Only that the inequality experienced by this gender have been exacerbated under the coronavirus epidemic. As one report puts it: ‘(Women) … bear the brunt of care responsibilities as schools close and family members fall ill. During lockdowns brought by the pandemic, women are at greater risk of domestic violence perpetrated by intimate partners and family members and concurrently have decreased access to violence prevention and support services. They are also disproportionately disadvantaged by reduced access to sexual and reproductive health services. Because women are more likely to have fewer hours of employed work, they are more affected by job losses in times of economic instability. Hard-fought gains for women’s rights are also under threat … (because of the pandemic).’

The implication of all this is that we have an enhanced appreciation of the dire inequality conditions and environment under which women operate and try to survive. And yet all this without adequate acknowledgement of the situation and the preparedness to confront and ameliorate it. Which is why it is important that women speak up and continue to organize to highlight their disadvantages and seek ways of turning the situation around going forward. The world is concerned now with recovery after the coronavirus pandemic, and yet the point has to be made that decisions about how to prepare for the end of the pandemic and the recovery thereafter are being made essentially, again, mainly by men even as we know that lack of adequate representation at the decision-making level would be and has always been inimical to the interests of those not represented. We therefore have the grave situation in which women are still going be marginalised and left behind in the pandemic recovery efforts in the world.

Evidently, women need greater involvement in the decision-making process in order to have the chance of addressing the persisting inequality ingrained even in the plan for pandemic recovery in the world. And in this regard, there is a glaring scarcity of women in political leadership positions, with the European Union Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen, recently lamenting that ‘at the next G-20 summit in Rome, I could be the only woman in the group!’, signposting the imminent departure of Angela Merkel, the redoubtable German Chancellor, from power, which would leave the 20 most important economies in the world, representing almost three-quarter of the world’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and accounting for around two-thirds of the world’s population, without any female leader. This is a dire situation for women that should also be unacceptable for the world if it is truly interested in overcoming inequality and advancing the real interests of women who constitute over a half of humanity. There would be the need to strictly monitor the requirement, for instance, but the European Union for the member states due for pandemic recovery support funds to ensure that economic revival plans encourage more women to participate in the work force, against the background of decreasing number of women in employment across the world.

Unfortunately, this would be a tall order not just on account of the dearth of women in political leadership that would be saddled with the responsibility of administering the funds and the total recovery efforts, but more because of the persisting patriarchal prejudice against women in almost all societies in the world which have resulted in a lack of societal support for women to be in the work place. Women have continued to complain about and bemoan the shortage of affordable day care and lack of adequate support for them in the areas of household chores and child-raising, with these factors militating against and discouraging women from taking and holding jobs. This is particularly the case in Nigeria where there are no clear policies to support women’s political and employment empowerment beyond the use of women as dancers at political rallies and as comfort providers for men in the context of the exertions of political campaigns. It is significant also that women are not featuring in the calculations and plans of the government in Nigeria in the absence of significant women representation at all levels of governmental activities even as the country has persistently observed in the breach the requirement for affirmative action of thirty five percent representation in all political offices for women. This means that in Nigeria and most of the countries of the world, there is an urgent need to place on the political burner the need for women not to be left behind again as the world grapples with pandemic recovery.

According to von der Leyen, women need the right support in terms of parental benefits, maternity and paternity leave and more and improved care for children and the elderly, with these policies requiring not just a cultural shift in the society, but also adequate resources to be earmarked by the political leadership. We must not continue with the aberration of paying women less than men for the same work or seeing pandemic recovery only from the perspective of male-dominated jobs and engagements. We know, in line with von der Leyen, that the road towards gender equality remains such a long one, but we must resolve, as part of the on-going efforts at pandemic recovery, take steps to provide societal access and resources for women to start shortening the road.

• Yakubu is of the Department of Communication and Language Arts, University of Ibadan.

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