Protecting Working Women in your Company in a Covid-19 new year
My master’s dissertation looked at data surrounding Covid’s early impact on the mental health of working women and mothers in the United Kingdom. Here are some facts that surprised me when reviewing the literature:
· The highest rates of depression in women are in married women, and studies have found that married women are depressed more often than never-married women (1).
· In a household with a married man and woman, the wife often performs more unpaid household labour (including cooking, cleaning, home management, and childcare) than her husband, even when she is employed (2), and earning more money than her husband (3).
· Household labour, especially childcare, interrupts women’s time at work more often and for longer periods than men (4).
· Marchand et al.’s (5) findings suggest that women are more likely than men to diminish their involvement in the professional domain to prioritise their family and protect their own mental health.
In sum, working moms in a two-parent, opposite-gender household have faced unique challenges for decades, and these stressors have become especially heavy during Covid-19. Married, working women’s mental health saw more than twice the decline than married, working men’s in April and May of this year, according to my analysis of the panel dataset UK Household Survey.
What does this mean for women and moms who are working in a corporate capacity? Unfolding evidence reveals that the consequences of Covid-related school and day care closures, work-from-home policies, shelter-in-place orders, and social restrictions on women in the workplace are in line with pre-Covid research, but are having much larger affects. According to a mid-2020 survey by McKinsey, women are 1.3 times more likely than men to have considered leaving their job or slowing down their careers — particularly mothers, senior women, and Black women (6). If women were to leave the workforce at this rate, corporate America could lose over 2 million women, over 100,000 of them women in senior leadership roles (6).
How can companies manage this flight risk and protect the well-being of the female talent in their businesses? My suggestions from this research centre on relieving some of the burdens of household labour on female employees:
· Provide employees with a separate work computer.
· Offer flexible working hours.
· Consider a childcare stipend that could cover learning pods or alternative education arrangements for older kids, in addition expanding day care benefits to cover compensating safe, non-traditional caretakers like family members or friends.
· Contemplate job-sharing arrangements for some roles.
· Offer paid mental health vacation days.
· Provide stipends for therapy or counselling.
· Encourage open communication within small teams and the broader organisation about balancing workloads from one week to the next.
· Avoid associating an employee’s propensity to be interrupted at work with professional performance or their commitment to your company.
· Remember, this is a though and trying time for many people, and an employee’s output, engagement and aspirations are likely to fluctuate at this time.
You can’t control family dynamics at home or a global pandemic, but you can make it easier for women to balance their personal and professional obligations without having to sacrifice their careers.
Sources:
1: Gove, W. R. (1972). The Relationship Between Sex Roles, Marital Status, and Mental Illness. Social Forces, 51(1), 34–44.
Radloff, L. S., & Rae, D. S. (1979). Susceptibility and precipitating factors in depression: Sex differences and similarities. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 88(2), 174–181. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-843X.88.2.174
2: Bianchi, S. M., Sayer, L. C., Milkie, M. A., & Robinson, J. P. (2012). Housework: Who did, does or will do it, and how much does it matter? Social Forces, 91(1), 55–63. https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/sos120
Titan, M. A., Doepke, M., Olmstead-Rumsey, J., & Tertilt, M. “The Impact of Covid-19 on Gender Equality.” NBER Working Paper №26947, National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), April 2020. https://doi.org/http://www.nber.org/papers/w26947
3: Bittman, M., England, P., Folbre, N., Sayer, L., & Matheson, G. (2003). When Does Gender Trump Money? Bargaining and Time in Household Work. American Journal of Sociology, 109(1), 186–214. https://doi.org/10.1086/378341
4: Andrew, A., Cattan, S., Dias, M. C., Farquharson, C., Kraftman, L., Krutikova, S., Phimister, A., & Sevilla, A. (2020, April). How are mothers and fathers balancing work and family under lockdown? (Report No. BN290). Institute for Fiscal Studies. https://doi.org/10.1920/BN.IFS.2020.BN0290
5: Marchand, A., Bilodeau, J., Demers, A., Beauregard, N., Durand, P., & Haines, V. Y. (2016). Gendered depression: Vulnerability or exposure to work and family stressors? Social Science and Medicine, 166, 160–168. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2016.08.021
6: Coury, S., Huang, J., Kumar, A., Prince, S., Krivkovich, A. & Yee, L (2020). Women in the Workplace. McKinsey & Company. https://wiw-report.s3.amazonaws.com/Women_in_the_Workplace_2020.pdf
