How to Stop the 'Shecession'
To "achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls" is one of the fundamental goals of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development of the United Nations. Despite the constant and continuous progress of the last decades, the achievement of gender equality remains a distant goal. According to the World Economic Forum, 31.4% average gender gap remains to be closed in the world in 2020. Without substantial changes, gender equality will not be attained for 99.5 years. The most critical dimensions are economic opportunities and political empowerment, in which only 58% and 23% of the gap has closed, respectively.
The outbreak of Covid-19 risks widening the existing gender gaps. Women are more vulnerable workers than men, they have low career prospects and weak position, which expose them to higher risks during economic crises. There is a general consensus that the pandemic crisis will be a "she-cession" in contrast to the "he-cession" crisis of 2008. In fact, while the pandemic hits the female dominated service sector strongly, the 2008 financial crisis hit male-dominated sectors (finance, manufacture) more seriously, and thus it was not associated with an increase of gender gaps in employment.
The risks are particularly serious in a country such as Italy, characterized by a stable low female employment (less than one out of two women work) and by persistent, traditional gender roles and gender norms. According to ISTAT, 74% of Italian women declare to fully bear housework without any sharing with the partner. The pandemic has increased the amount of work for families. Although the distribution of this extra work between women and men in the family depends on the work arrangements of each partner during the lockdown (working from home, at the usual place, not working), in a recent study (Del Boca et al., 2020) we show that it has mainly fallen on women. This is particularly true for housework, while we have observed some increased sharing in childcare. Even in a symmetric situation of both partners working at home, 65% of women increased their housework versus 40% of men. The corresponding percentages for childcare are 77% for women and 60% for men. This unequal sharing contributes to enlarging gender gaps on the labor market, as a more balanced allocation of housework within the couple is associated with higher participation of women in the labor market (and also to higher fertility rates, see Fanelli and Profeta, 2019).
In this critical scenario, policy interventions are needed to stop the "she-recession". Countries are introducing measures such as additional periods of parental leave, baby-sitter vouchers, allowances or other supports to the family. The effectiveness of these policies will be evaluated in the future.
An important contribution is expected from the use of "smart-working", i.e. flexible place and time of work. According to our study based on the introduction of flexible work in normal times before Covid-19 (Angelici and Profeta, 2020), men who use smart-working increase by almost 50% the time they spend on housework. Thus, smart-working has the potential to rebalance the asymmetric division of labor within the couple, which in turn may drive a reduction of gender differences in the labor market. However this result will probably become visible only in the long-run.
The presence itself of a gender balanced policy-making leadership can make the difference and help promoting successful strategies. The relationship between female leadership and public policy has attracted a strong attention in recent times. Anectodical evidence shows that countries led by women -Denmark, Finland, Germany, Iceland, New Zealand, Norway, Taiwan - are performing better in dealing with the COVID crisis. Obviously, this simple correlation cannot have a causal interpretation. Yet it seems that the style of female leadership matters in dealing successfully with crises. This style includes telling the truth, a great amount of decisiveness, the use of advanced technology and innovative communication. Recent papers have tried to provide rigorous empirical support to this anecdotical evidence (see, among the others, Garikipati and Kambhampati, 2020). They argue that the positive performance of female leadership can be the result of the style of policy response adopted by men and women: women have been more proactive and coordinated with policy responses.
It is now more than ever urgent to start a virtuous process in which a gender balanced leadership promotes a gender balanced policy agenda with the final goal of promoting gender equality (Profeta, 2020), with beneficial effects on the overall economy and on society.