Framework to analyze COVID-19 related job losses: Is gender a factor?

Abstract

Working in an environment that is free from discrimination of any kind is a fundamental right of all workers, irrespective of their personal characteristics. The right to equality is absolute, and carried forward into the work place. However, this is often not the case, as women at the workplace face various types of discrimination. One such factor that we have observed in literature and the news is discrimination when it comes to job losses. We observed that women tend to lose their jobs far more often and for far longer than men. We wondered whether their gender played a factor in the same, and was a cause for their job losses. Hence, we set out, through this project to develop a framework for the same and try to see if gender played a factor in job losses. For this, we interviewed multiple employees and employers across the formal and informal sector, to see if we could find some casual relationship. As an outcome of the project, we find that through our qualitative study, we can see no causal relationship between being female and losing one’s job. The two are corelated but factors such as lower education levels, more women employed in informal roles and voluntary giving up of jobs due to social pressures play a larger role, as opposed to discrimination due to just being women.