Gendered responses

As Sri Lanka looks down the barrel of a third COVID-19 wave, there is a need to consider the short- and longer-term gendered impacts and work to address them.  

The latest ‘South Asia Economic Focus: South Asia Vaccinates’ released by the World Bank earlier this month shows that even before the latest wave recovery was poised to be uneven, both among and within countries. 

The preliminary evidence available suggests adverse economic and human capital impacts for women. Women are considered more vulnerable to job and earning losses due to the nature of their work—largely informal, service-sector jobs, especially in the care economy, which require in-person contact. Further, prolonged lockdowns to suppress the virus in South Asia have implied higher risks for domestic violence and reduced access to education for girls.

Employment shocks have hit men and women alike during this pandemic, but the impact on women will likely last longer. Initial pilot survey data from the region indicate that men and women have been hit hard by job losses.

The reduction in earnings among women respondents who continued working (64%) is almost double that for men (36%). Complementary evidence also suggests that the large part of labour market adjustment in the region has been through earning losses and reduction in work hours, rather than through job losses. However, there are differences within the region: women in informal employment in Bangladesh and Maldives are more likely than men to see their working hours reduced, but the opposite is true in Pakistan. 

Some gendered impacts on firms were likely because women are overrepresented in affected sectors. Increased tensions within the household and economic stress are likely to impact mental health. A more encouraging finding is that more than half the women surveyed by the UN Women Rapid Assessment Survey (2020) report getting increased help from their partners in

At the same time, the greater flexibility of informal workers may also contribute to a faster recovery of employment. Informal wage workers in India were significantly more vulnerable to the loss of employment than formal workers during the early phase of COVID-19 surveyed in April 2020. They also experienced a larger decline in income than formal workers did. But informal workers recovered faster than formal workers, and by July 2020, the decline in employment and income was not significantly different across informal and formal workers. 

This comparison holds even after accounting for industry, occupation, or location-specific heterogeneity in the COVID- 19 shock, suggesting that informal employment is intrinsically more flexible. Nonetheless, informal workers make a greater effort to search for jobs or be more willing to accept lower-paying jobs because of fewer outside income buffers, making them more vulnerable and more likely to experience income loss.

Income distribution clearly worsened as a result of the pandemic, and welfare losses were concentrated at the poorer end of the income distribution. This will mean that women will need extra support to recover from pandemic impact and need targeted policies as many of them will be in the informal or semi-formal segments of the economy. Reaching these women and enabling them to become more empowered partners of Sri Lanka’s economy is essential for overall survival, recovery and sustainable growth.