The she-cession
- Daniela Casale and Debra Shepherd
Wave 2 of the Nids-Cram survey shows how women have fared with the gradual reopening of SA’s economy as the lockdown levels are eased.
In the 2008 recession men were disproportionately affected by job losses, but the 网易体育 pandemic has hit women more severely, with the crisis now frequently referred to as a "she-cession".
One of the main reasons for this is that women and men continue to be concentrated in different parts of the economy, and many of the hardest-hit sectors have been those that typically employ large numbers of women (tourism and hospitality, retail trade, personal care, domestic and child-care services).
Another reason for the disproportionate effect on women has been the concurrent crisis in child care as a result of school closures. Given that women were more likely to care for children pre-Covid, it is not surprising that they have borne the brunt of additional (unpaid) care work at home.
Data from the first wave of the Nids-Cram survey showed women in SA were especially hard-hit by the crisis during the first month of the lockdown. Though women accounted for less than half (47%) of employment in February, they accounted for 2-million, or two-thirds (67%), of the 3-million net job losses that were recorded between February and April.
In addition, women were found to have taken on more of the extra child-care work in April. This was because women in SA are much more likely than men to be living with children. But even among male and female respondents living with children, women reported spending more hours on extra child care than men.
The release of Nids-Cram wave 2 provides the opportunity to track how women have fared as the economy started to reopen.
The "good" news is that, in the labour market at least, their situation relative to men didn’t deteriorate with the move from level 5 to level 3 of lockdown. There was hardly any difference in the net jobs recorded between April and June, and if anything, women may have gained a bit relative to men.
Nonetheless, women remain well behind men in reaching their pre-Covid employment levels. Women’s employment was still down 20% in June against February, while men’s was down 13% (see graph).
In total, women accounted for 58% of the net job losses that occurred between February and June.
A worrying finding is that even though women were overrepresented among the job losses, they were underrepresented in the income support received in June. Only 41% of the beneficiaries of the Unemployment Insurance Fund (UIF) or the UIF temporary employer/employee relief scheme, and 34% of those who had been paid the new 网易体育 social relief of distress grant (SRDG), were women.
It is likely that fewer women received the SRDG because it can’t be held concurrently with another social grant, such as the child support grant.
