"This pandemic is not democratic": Tamara Cincik on the pressures facing women
By Tamara Cincik, Fashion Roundtable CEO
Anyone who watched our IGTV live news roundup yesterday, will have seen my son walking back and forth on the screen, possibly heard him eating a rather loud rice cake and me trying to ask him to read his book in two languages (whenever I speak Turkish to him, it is code for this is serious!). This was happening all while discussing the impacts of Covid-19 and Brexit on the fashion industry, the decimation of bricks and mortar retail, and the passing of Rep. John Lewis. It is several months since Dukey was, alongside most other children, told they could not go back to school and we had to juggle lockdown, my husband's work drying up— he’s a freelance camera operator— home schooling and a lack of contact with friends and family all in a flat. I was busier than ever with Fashion Roundtable, initially working on PPE strategy, which meant weeks of conference calls and hours a day of emails.
This is the shared norm. We have all survived and I know in many ways I am luckier than most, but what has been clear is that many women have seen the impacts of the lockdown with greater implications on their incomes, careers and well-being than men have. In 2020, we have all experienced a global pandemic and watched our worlds shrink, while collectively carrying the concerns of these consequences on our careers and futures. However, as I have known since this started, this pandemic is not democratic. The news from the charity Refuge of a 300%+ increase in calls to their helpline highlights the worrying escalation in violence against women literally locked in a home with their abusers. While, again and again, I have heard women decide to not apply for a job, literally left holding the baby while they juggle ever harder to manage their work, their household duties, as well as homeschooling and feeding themselves (and their families) on shrinking budgets. Many women in fashion are self-employed or registered as company directors paying themselves a dividend (like Jodi our Communications Director). If you earnt over £50k as a freelancer you have not had a penny of financial support from the government, this also applies if you are a company director. Suddenly you were reliant on the earning of your partner, if they were on PAYE they received up to £2500k a month, no matter what they earn (there was no limit on government support to PAYE employees, something we flagged repeatedly with the government). Women who post-maternity leave, will look to part-time, or self-employed and flexible working patterns, as they navigate how to mitigate expensive childcare costs versus working. Nursery costs on average almost £7k a year, more if you are in a city, and of course many families have more than one child. Women now excel at school, at university and in their careers, but drop off a financial cliff once they have children. A cliff they economically never recover from for their whole working lives.
So how does this relate back to the economic impacts of the lockdown? If you had maternity leave or went part-time, or put all your earnings back into your business (a common theme in the sector) the money you might have received (if any from the government), looked at the last 3 years, not taking any maternity leave into account. This means many women have seen a massive drop in their earnings. It is not just the financial impact, it’s the consequences on women's careers too. Just last night I met a female academic who said "I am watching my career go down the drain," while trying to organise a playdate. The evidence is clear that while a male and female academic in the same household with the same qualifications and indeed the same children might be living together, statistically the male will be applying for research grants, while the woman will be deciding not to apply as they bear the brunt of household duties and homeschooling. What does this tell us about how we are valued as women both in the home, in the workplace and in society in 2020?
There is no end in sight to homeschooling. While pubs are open all hours and we are now officially on school holidays, last week my son's school emailed to say not only was there no budget for any tutoring, they and the other schools in the area expect us to work a 4.5 day week to allow them to deep clean the school from September and other schools have organised a staggered attendance. This means parents will be stuck at a school gate for hours each day for drop off and pick up, trying to work from their phones while looking after their children. It is literally a school gate "Waiting For Godot”. And when we get to that Beckettian autumn, I guarantee it will be women who are waiting by the fence on their phones, holding their children's hands.
The Statistics— Women in Academia
Digital Science, a London-based company, specialising in research analysis tools, show that women’s publishing dipped after COVID-19 closed schools. The drop in the share of papers by female authors was particularly pronounced in April when it fell by more than two per cent to 31.2 per cent, and May, which saw a fall of seven points to 26.8 per cent.
More broadly from Institute of Fiscal Studies Report -
The pressure on parents’ time is immense. On average, parents are doing childcare during 9 hours of the day, and housework during 3. Among all parents, paid work now takes up an average of just 3 hours, partly driven by the large losses in employment. By contrast, comparable figures from 2014/15 suggest that, on a regular school day, parents did 5½ hours of childcare and 6½ hours of paid work. Furthermore, parents are now often doing at least two activities at the same time.
Mothers are more likely to have quit or lost their job, or to have been furloughed, since the start of the lockdown. Of parents who were in paid work prior to the lockdown, mothers are one-and-a-half times more likely than fathers to have either lost their job or quit since the lockdown began. They are also more likely to have been furloughed. In all, mothers who were in paid work in February are 9 percentage points less likely to be currently working for pay (either remotely or on-site) than fathers.
Compared with fathers, mothers are spending less time on paid work but more time on household responsibilities. The time they spend on paid work is also more likely to be interrupted with household responsibilities. Mothers are doing paid work during 2 fewer hours of the day than fathers, but they do childcare and housework during 2 more hours each. Mothers combine paid work with other activities (almost always childcare) in 47% of their work hours, compared with 30% of fathers’ work hours.
The differences in work patterns between mothers and fathers have grown since before the crisis. In 2014/15, mothers were in paid work at 80% of the rate of fathers; now this is 70% of the fathers’ rate. Mothers in paid work used to work an average of 73% of the hours that fathers worked; this has fallen to 68%. Mothers and fathers used to be interrupted during the same proportion of their work hours; now mothers are interrupted over 50% more often.
Overall, in 2014/15, the average mother (including those who did not work for pay) was doing nearly 60% of the number of uninterrupted work hours that the average father did; now she is doing only 35%. Since difficult labour market conditions are likely to persist for some time, reductions in paid work now may also persist even after the immediate health crisis is diminished. Workers who have lost their jobs permanently may struggle to find new ones, workers who have reduced their hours may struggle to increase them again, and workers whose productivity has suffered due to interruptions may be penalised in pay and promotion decisions. The disproportionate decrease in mothers’ paid work now suggests any long lasting effects will be particularly severe for them.
Families respond differently to a partner stopping paid work depending on whether it is the mother or the father who stops.Mothers who have stopped working for pay during lockdown while their partner continues do twice as much childcare and housework as their partner. In the reverse situation, in families where the father has stopped working, the parents share childcare and housework equally, while the mother also does 5 hours of paid work a day.
The gaps between mothers’ and fathers’ time use are not straightforwardly explained by mothers’ lower employment rates or lower earnings. Gender gaps in time use remain even when comparing mothers working for pay with fathers working for pay and when comparing mothers and fathers not currently in paid work. Likewise, even in families where mothers were the higher earner before the crisis and both partners are still working, mothers still do more childcare and the same amount of housework as their partner.
Despite doing less childcare than mothers, during lockdown fathers have nearly doubled the time they spend on childcare.On average, fathers are now doing some childcare during 8 hours of the day, compared with 4 hours in 2014/15. This increase is especially large for the 15% of fathers in previously dual-earner households who have lost their job while their partner continues to do paid work. This large increase in fathers’ involvement in childcare might have long-lasting impacts on how couples share childcare responsibilities.
Likewise our Communications Director, Jodi Muter-Hamilton, shares her views:
“As a mother of children who recently turned 5 and 3, I have for the last 5 years needed to work flexible hours. Like many others, the best way for me to balance financial and family responsibilities, alongside my ambition, has been to set up my own company, placing me as a Director. Business owners themselves, still remain overlooked by any Covid-19 Government support. Working flexible hours doesn’t mean part-time for me, it means full-time around the clock, with little time off. As someone whose business, in part, supports other women to build their businesses and also works with female freelancers, I entirely understand the dynamics between equality and work. Post-pandemic, I feel we will need to work harder than ever before to reach the earning potential of those who have not needed to consider childcare. This issue doesn’t simply restrict women, but puts additional pressure on partners to remain in jobs they don’t want but feel, due to security, they need to. Creating a more flexible work culture, and levelling up the pay gap, is essential to ensure a healthy mental and financial future.”
From a government perspective, Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, has recently accused the prime minister of putting parents in an “impossible position” by urging them to go back to the workplace next month, without offering any support for the struggling childcare sector.