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COVID-19 / US Bloomberg Businessweek March 16, 2020Will gender
inequality worsen?
○ In strictly medical terms, the new coronavirus
seems to hit men harder than women. In an anal-
ysis of almost 45,000 cases in China, the death rate
was 2.8% for men, compared with 1.7% for women.
And men made up a slight majority of the infected,
at 51%. One theory is that men, particularly in
China, are more likely to smoke cigarettes, so they
have weaker lungs. Cardiovascular disease, which is
highly correlated with coronavirus fatalities, is also
more prevalent in men. But as the virus spreads
globally, it appears women are bearing the brunt of
the social and economic disruption.
The vast majority of nurses, flight attendants,
teachers, and service industry workers are female,
and their jobs put them on the front lines of the out-
break. At home, women still do more caretaking,
so when the virus closes schools, restricts travel,
and puts aged relatives at risk, they have more to
do. “The challenge of the emergency really puts
additional strain on existing inequalities,” says
Laura Addati, a policy specialist in women and eco-
nomic empowerment for the International Labor
Organization. “If there’s not already an egalitarian
sharing of child care or housework, it will be women
who are responsible for remote school, for ensuring
there’s food and supplies, for coping with this crisis.”
Eight out of 10 nurses are women, perhaps the
most extreme example of how this crisis squeezes
women at home and at work. Eleanor Holroyd,
a professor of nursing at the Chinese University
of Hong Kong in 2003, collected the first-person
accounts of student nurses during the SARS epi-
demic. They detailed the confusion, anxiety, and
stress of long days with patients and of watching
colleagues fall ill. Some slept in the hospital, both
to care for the sick and to protect their own fam-
ilies. “There’s this idea that if there’s a gap in the
system, the nurses will fill it. The duty is to be ever-
present and visible and offering empathy and care,”
says Holroyd, who now teaches at New Zealand’s
Auckland University of Technology. “Add that to
anything else, a sick child or parent, or a husband
or partner out of work, the very uncertain nature of
an epidemic, and it can be hard to hold on.”
As part of the containment efforts, 15 countries
have closed schools nationwide, affecting more
than 300 million kids, according to a March 10 esti-
mate from Unesco. For most families, that con-
stitutes a crisis in its own right. In Hong Kong,where schools have been closed since Feb. 3, many
parents—mostly moms—have become de facto
home-schoolers, managing remote classes and
emailed assignments along with their own profes-
sional responsibilities. On Facebook and in group
chats, they troubleshoot glitches with Zoom or
Google Classroom and swap tips for dealing with
stir-crazy kids. There is a lot of and #winetime.○ Or will there be a more even
distribution of caretaking?Some companies have begun to realize that the
spread of Covid-19 has also brought extra pressures
for their workers. In Japan, Pasona Group Inc., a
human resources service provider, gave employ-
ees the freedom to work from home or bring their
kids to the office. Workers at beauty companyShiseido Co. can take up to 10 days of paid leave
to care for their children while schools are closed,
and they won’t lose pay if they have to work slightly
shorter days. In the U.S., labor leaders, including
the heads of big unions for flight attendants, teach-
ers, and nurses, have been using the coronavirus
epidemic to draw attention to the fact that America
is alone among developed countries without man-
dated paid sick leave. “No one should have to go
to work sick because they are worried about being
penalized or missing a day’s pay,” says Mary Kay
Henry, the president of the Service Employees
International Union.
Advocates for equality hope this global health
crisis will result in a more even distribution of pro-
fessional and domestic caretaking. Before the U.S.
entered World War II in 1940, 28% of American
women worked outside the home; five years
later, 37% did, a percentage that ticked upwards
for decades. In Japan, the tsunami and nuclear In China’s Hainan
province, where
overseas organizations
are shipping more
masks