Higher female unemployment and a greater proportion of women leaving the labour market due to the pandemic has set back progress towards gender equality in work by at least two years, according to an analysis by consultancy PwC two years after World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID 19 a pandemic. The report stresses the importance of women benefitting from new jobs created by the green economy.

”After a decade of slow but consistent gains from women in work across the OECD, the Index fell for the first time in its history”, the Women in Work Index shows. The index assesses women´s employment across 33 OECD countries.

There were 5.1 million more women unemployed and 5.2 million fewer women participating in the labour market than would be the case had the pandemic not occurred.

”Childcare and domestic work responsibilities played a significant role in causing women to leave the workforce.”

Mothers were three times more likely than fathers to report taking on either the majority, or all, of the additional unpaid care work created by school or childcare facility closures.

Given the slow progress made over the past 10 years and lost ground due to the pandemic, PwC estimates it will take years – in some cases decades – to close the gaps and achieve gender parity between women and men in the global workplace:

• Female labour force participation rate (33 years to match men’s current 80% rate)
• Female to male labour force participation rate gap (30 years to close the gap)
• Female unemployment rate (9 years to match men’s current rate)
• Female full-time employment rate (67 years to equal the current share of male employees in full-time employment)
• Gender pay gap (63 years to close the gap)

The report says that to reverse the setback to women’s employment, more flexible working options are needed, particularly that address the underlying gender inequalities in unpaid care and domestic work. Policies like equal paid parental leave that help to redistribute the unequal burden of care carried by women.”

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”Even more critical will be the need for government and business to support women to benefit from the job opportunities created by the transition of OECD economies to net zero. The next decade of work will be shaped to a large extent by the transition of economies to net zero emissions.”

”Our analysis shows that the net zero transition will increase jobs overall, with more jobs in 2030 in 15 out of 20 sectors across the OECD economies. However, the largest proportional gains in jobs will be in utilities, construction and manufacturing, which are disproportionately underrepresented by women. These sectors currently employ nearly a third of the male workforce across the OECD, compared to only 11% of the female workforce.”

If nothing is done to improve women’s representation in these sectors, PwC estimates that the employment gap between men and women across the OECD will widen by 1.7 percentage points by 2030 (rising from 20.8% in 2020 to 22.5% in 2030).