Aashish Mishra

The COVID-19 pandemic is a crisis that the world was not prepared to handle. Some countries are doing better than others but no one is out of the woods yet. Everyone has been impacted terribly by this crisis but women have had to suffer more. From rise in domestic violence and online harassment to loss of personal space, women are grappling with a lot. However, one issue has not found its way into mainstream discussions and that is the issue of unpaid work.
Women have always done more unpaid work than men - mainly in the form of household chores and family care. In fact, women around the world spend an average of 12.5 billion hours on unpaid work every day. Nepali women spend around 4.5 hours of their day engaged in work that yields no financial rewards, according to Unpaid Care Work Programme’s Nepal Progress Report for the year 2012/13. Most of this time goes to caring for the children, a work that has increased significantly since the pandemic began.
Schools were among the first institutions to be closed at the start of the pandemic. That means that for over eight months now, thousands of children have been stuck at home, dependent on their parents (primarily mothers) for care. This has made it difficult for women, especially working women, to devote time to their own employment and education and is causing them to fall behind their male counterparts. This may, unfortunately, translate to an increase in education dropouts and employment resignations in the aftermath of this crisis.
Women forced to stop their education and/or quit their jobs this way will be put into a disadvantage that will be hard to recover from. To rejoin school or college means to restart the entire course from scratch, demanding extra time that women have a hard time managing. In the field of employment too, women have a harder time getting jobs than men. The Nepal Labour Force Survey shows that only 59 women find employment for every 100 men. And when women do manage to find jobs, they earn Rs. 5,381 less than their male colleagues. Challenges like these will be exacerbated by the environment created by COVID-19.
The pandemic is proving to be a rough time for women of our country and the world and the immediate post-pandemic future does not look too promising as well. This situation calls for the formulation of a gender policy and the introduction of alleviative programmes. But while doing this, the authorities and advocates must be careful to consciously consider the differences among women groups. Not all women are in the same situations, have the same resources or face the same challenges. The policymakers and the parties supporting them need to realise this and come up with solutions that support everyone.
Furthermore, policies should not be based on assumptions or estimations. They need concrete and reliable data, something our country does not have at the moment. So, the first thing - the immediate thing - to do is to mobilise our agencies (perhaps the Central Bureau of Statistics) to collect gender-disaggregated data on the pandemic and its primary, secondary and tertiary impacts on women and girls. This data will provide a sufficiently clear picture which will, in turn, enable government and non-governmental organisations to focus their efforts. It will also provide a benchmark against which the results can be measured.
But more immediately, something we can do is to relieve the women around us from the burden of unpaid work. Let us share in some of the household responsibilities, allow our mothers and sisters to rest and give them space where they can be themselves away from what the society asks them to be.