Feminism’s 25-year setback ‘terrifying’ for young people
COVID-19 could set back feminism progress by 25 years according to new data from UN Women.
With lockdown forcing many people to stay at home, significantly more unpaid work, such as household chores and childcare, is being carried out by women.
Women were already doing three times as much unpaid work as men before the pandemic, but Deputy Executive Anita Bhatia told the BBC: “I assure you that number has at least doubled.
UN Women’s Deputy Executive Director Anita Bhatia believes that COVID-19 could set feminism back 25 years
“This increase could cause a “real risk of reverting [us] to 1950s gender stereotypes,” she continued, something that Clare McKeown, a Strathclyde PhD student specialising in gender studies, agrees with.
“I think it all comes down to historic gendered roles,” she said. There are different expectations for men and women, and “even if intellectually we know better, they still persist.
“We know that men can be carers,” she continued. “We know that women can go into and do all of the same jobs.” But these lingering expectations still see men and women fall into certain roles.”
McKeown believes that having children at home over the lockdown is a big factor in this new data.
“Who’s looking after them and making sure they’re doing their lessons? A lot of that stuff often falls on women,” she said. COVID-19 has brought a lot of social issues like gender inequality back into the limelight McKeown explained.
“In general people aren’t really aware of how much gender inequality is still embedded in our daily lives, in ways we often don’t see.
“The thing about COVID: it’s exposed so many fault lines in our society that already existed,” she said. “It isn’t that these issues are new.”
One of the toughest realisations of the setback outlined by UN Women is the impact on the younger generation.
“Young people, men and women, are coming out into a massively contracted job market, but that’s likely to have a disproportionate effect on women,” McKeown said.
Ester Eriksson, president of Edinburgh Napier’s Feminism Society, reiterated these concerns. “I personally feel like I already see some terrifying changes,” she said, “in opportunities for self-governance and career prospects.
“If the world we move into post-graduation is one where women have to navigate both higher expectations and requirements to do unpaid labour, as well as settle for jobs way below our qualifications, it’s just losing out on an entire generation.”
Eriksson doesn’t think she or other feminists will lose motivation to make progress, despite the setback, “but that doesn’t mean it will be easy,” she said.
“It creates a devious incentive to succumb to patriarchal structures, such as women completely quitting work and instead relying on men to support them.”
The UN is raising these issues in their report and is calling on governments and businesses to act on the new data.
Image Credit: The Indian Express
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