“She-cession” Global, Not Local

If you’ve read the blog at all over the past year, you’ve probably seen us discuss, time and again, how the pandemic lockdowns and major contractions in the employment market has had a disproportionate effect on women. Whether it is increasing the number of hours spent working, picking up the slack in domestic life, being forced to quit to take care of children or other family, or leaving the job market entirely, women in the US have taken the brunt of the pandemic’s resulting economic crisis, so much so that it has been dubbed the first “she-cession.”

But, in an effort to demonstrate how universal this predicament is, we want to bring you some international news. Specifically, the Financial Times reports this week that in a global survey of readers, researchers found that women were much more likely than their male counterparts to be considering “reducing their workloads,” which aligns with findings from a recent McKinsey report that women in senior professional roles were 1.5 times more likely to be considering scaling back careers or leaving the workforce entirely. 

Mothers are doubly affected, with half of the female FT survey respondents “strongly agreeing” with the statement “I feel it is expected that the extra household duties would fall on me” as opposed to just over 20% of men.

Other notable findings include large percentages of respondents felt that their level of happiness has gone down while their stress level and ability to devote uninterrupted time to work has gone up with half of female respondents “strongly agreeing” that “I can hardly manage more than an hour of uninterrupted work.” The complete results of the survey are well worth the read and provide a more global context to what we at Berke-Weiss have been noting for a long time now.