Achieving an equal future for women in a COVID-19 world

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Female job loss rates were about 1.8 times higher than male job loss rates globally during the COVID-19 crisis, according to McKinsey and Company. At the same time, women saw a 70% decline in part-time jobs in the first three months of the pandemic.

This data means that a third of the female rcs data south africa is thinking about leaving the workforce or changing their career. That has implications for the economy, according to Amy Smyth, director of the European Centre of Excellence for Career Management at Right Management, part of Talent Solutions.

For the executive, “if we think about the long-term health of our economy globally, working women in Europe and North America contribute a huge amount to the macroeconomic numbers, between 35% and 45% of a country’s GDP.” According to Smyth, “if we don’t really address these issues about women’s employment, we will all be poorer for it, men and women.”

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Understanding the root cause
Why aren’t there more women in senior positions? According to Brendan Plessis, EVP of Sompo International and mentor of the Right Management Advanced Program, “the key reason is looking at the work patterns associated with motherhood and when women have children.”

For this expert, “women are much more likely to take on the bulk of childcare and responsibilities and therefore require flexible working arrangements. This could tie me into part-time positions, and indeed an analysis by the Institute for Fiscal Studies found that once you are on reduced hours, you are very unlikely to progress in terms of pay or promotion . You just get stuck.”

Employers can address this by making it easier for part-time employees to advance or by returning them to their previous status. “It could also be that more senior jobs are explicitly available on a part-time basis. This could be through advertising, promoting or implementing more standard and flexible working practices and then making job sharing easier and more attractive.”