Issues of equality affect a woman’s chances of not just success as a worker but utter survival for them and their families that rely on them, which is even more imperative in economically impoverished areas. Delving into the multi-faceted and compounding issues, beginning with the external challenges that women face just to enter into the workforce, is a first step to truly understanding how the pandemic has unjustly affected women. These external barriers that disproportionately affect women begins at a young age, as the amount of work that they are paid for is significantly less than men. In South America, many countries such as Chile report that women are left unpaid for up to 40% of their work time, while men see only 20% of their work time unpaid (Gender Equality Observatory, 2019). This fact raises concerns about the devaluation of women’s work, whether this work is childcare, elderly care, community work or housework, women deserve to be paid for their time. Women trading more hours of work unpaid means they have more obstacles and responsibilities just to enter the labor force.

 

These issues combined with a lack of participation by men to cover for women in unpaid domestic work perpetuates a belittling of women’s work. That expectation of free work is partially due to the depreciated value of care work and the assumption that it is a woman’s duty to uphold. Whether for themselves, their families or for others, women caring for the basic necessities of survival should not be worth nothing because it becomes a massive barrier for women to request payment for any work. 

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This point of care work being devalued as women’s work, as women’s sole responsibility, brings up the next challenge that more women face to enter into the workplace: finding affordable childcare. The intersection between the world of women and the world of poverty exacerbates this issue to a higher degree. A CAP analysis of child care providers across the U.S. found that half of Americans live in a child care desert, where there are few options for licensed child care at any cost (NPR, 2016). This issue is pervasive across cultures; it becomes a pitfall for women without the privilege to be able to pay for childcare or a nanny upfront. In the past, this question may have been easier to handle but since the COVID pandemic, childcare has become a huge part of why both North and South American women have not been able to return to work. 

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With the potential risks of the spread of disease, less grandparents are able to watch children, pushing more responsibility on mothers themselves. On top of this, government mandates have required that only essential workers are allowed to use childcare facilities, which puts a larger demand for in-home nannies which are much more expensive. Many women aren’t able to afford a nanny and rely on public facilities to be available for work consistently. Over the past two decades, the cost of childcare has more than doubled (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Beta Labs, 2020), while wages have remained mostly stagnant (Desilver, 2018). These standards have become like pulling teeth where every avenue to find affordable childcare becomes a dead end. It creates a classist gap between the women who have the upfront cash to pay nannies and those who cannot are unjustly forced to tradeoff work with caring for their children. This ends up as a difficulty for any single mother, especially so for minority women where 71% of Black mothers and 41% of Latina mothers serve as the primary economic support for their families (Glynn, 2016). Those living in poverty are often caught in this never-ending cycle of not being able to find work to pay for childcare and not being able to pay for childcare to be free to work.

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This conundrum can be explained as the snake eating its own tail, and it finds a way to cause problems not only for women just to be able to enter the workplace, it also causes problems at every stage of a woman’s career. Because women’s employment remains concentrated in low-paying, part-time, entry-level, temporary jobs or self-employment, an unskilled woman can never gain more experience without a job opportunity, and employers only give jobs to those who already have experience (Quartaro, 2009). This barrier helps to create occupational gender segregation because females are often never given the chance to learn male-dominated trades. Further, female-dominated trades, like in-home healthcare and childcare, across the board offer lower wages and benefits than male-dominated professions.  This is especially painful right now as women are forced to find new skills that are still in demand in this post-pandemic society. Effects we have seen thus far are staunchly different than those of a normal economic downturn: manufacturing and construction jobs are usually the first to be affected, instead the few female-dominated industries like education and hospitality took the largest hit (Alon et al. 2020). Industries such as these were completely shut down for months and companies are being forced to close for good, so more women need to switch industries altogether to find any job that will feed their families. This pressure forces many women to find the first job they can, even if it means accepting a lower pay rate. 

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At the intersection between the world of women and the world of poverty is a life on the edge of pure survival. Every decision involves trade-offs and opportunities either gained or lost. In South America, those facing the highest risk of poverty are the growing number of households in which women are the only breadwinners (17 percent overall; 19 percent in urban areas) (World Bank 2012).Working mothers are a completely under-utilized and underserved group despite proof that female income can become a powerful force in reducing the long-term effects of this economic downturn, in the last decade alone contributing 30% to extreme poverty reduction in Latin America (2000-2010, $2.5USD/PPP) (World Bank, 2011).

 

If we choose to empower this growing part of the labor market, more children will be able to grow up in financially stable homes without worrying about food on the table every night. These mothers can become powerful forces for our economy when given the opportunity to make a career jump to a new industry that is in demand. If we allow pay inequalities to continue, we hurt women, but we also cause our economic society to suffer in response. 

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The true impact of the wage gap and occupational segregation is more easily shown by the compounding effects of these wage inequalities on the market as a whole. In the U.S. alone, more than 55 million women working full-time earned an estimated $545.7 billion less than their male counterparts in 2019 (Bleiweis, 2020). If the gender wage gap had been closed entirely, this would have meant an additional $545.7 billion in the pockets of working women and their families—about $9,613.13 per woman—to cover student loan payments, mortgage payments, child care costs, prescription costs, groceries, emergency expenses, and more (Bleiweis, 2020).  With this gap closing at the current rate of 4 cents per decade, women will not reach pay parity with men until 2059 which will slow even further with COVID backtracking of all the progress women have made thus far (Lacarte and Hayes, 2019). The real cost of not valuing women as equals goes much deeper than the dollar value, it begins affecting women at a young age, providing barriers at every step of their education leading into their career.

 

The gender digital divide is a complex issue that stems both from the assumptions and standards expected of girls as they grow up as well as lack of access to technology and education. Funding needed to own a smartphone or computer to be able to access the internet is a huge barrier for women in Latin America to find more opportunities for work. With society moving towards an online, platform-based “gig economy,” many women who are not setup with internet access will be left behind. We can see how this internet access has boosted women’s capabilities in developed countries such as the U.S. where more females drive for Uber (14%) than traditional taxis (8%) (OECD Directorate for Science, Technology and Innovation, 2018).This points to the importance of flexibility in work times for female drivers, with 42% stating the main reason they need varying work hours is for a “family, education, or health reason” (as compared to 26% in the case of men) (Hall and Krueger, 2015). With more women needing work flexibility, online-based occupations can be a powerful tool for women to succeed. This means that girls’ education of the importance of technology is only one step of the comprehensive education needed for women to be able use it to their financial benefit. We need to level the playing field for all genders from all economic backgrounds because learning how to use a computer is now a necessary component of success. 

 

Burdens placed on young girls need to be uprooted, instead we need to quickly provide the resources girls need to realize their full potential. Without an intervention, the current direction our society is heading will leave an unprecedented number of girls to fend for themselves. Drawing on data from the Ebola epidemic in Sierra Leone, if the dropout rate continues, an estimated 20 million additional young girls will not be returning to school in developing countries and will not have access to the empowerment of knowledge (Fry and Lei, 2020). Without schools open, those with the privilege to access a computer at home automatically have a higher chance to succeed: which is more likely to be boys, since they are paid more often for their work. This head start in early childhood may not seem like much, but as our society grows towards an online community due to the pandemic, more women will be left out of the information and knowledge that it takes to succeed in the growing economy of science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields. It will slow the progress of our economy picking back up again, since millions of women will not be able to participate in the labor force in the coming years.