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Facebook CEO Cheryl Sandberg says years of efforts for gender equality could be gone. PHOTO: Reuters
Millions are willing to quit their jobs if they have to take care of their children at home again
When the pandemic began, American writer Ahly Ostru drew up a tight schedule of how she would combine her work for a home-based marketing company with caring for her two children who dropped out of school. Initially, I was highly motivated to accept the challenge. He gets up early in the morning to work. When the children wake up, he begins to deal with them. He prepares food for them. See how they learn online, they play. When her husband returns from work, she steals a few more hours to work, as well as after dinner and the others go to bed.
“With these constant breaks, lots of juggling schedules and everything in between, it felt like I had to work 60 or 80 hours to do what I used to do for 40,” Ostroy, 33, told Al Jazeera. At the same time, your children grow increasingly unhappy and struggle to get your attention. She has no time for her husband and sometimes even to sleep. You try to negotiate with your employer to reduce tasks, but it is impossible, as the company is also struggling to maintain its business.
At one point, Ostru begins to think that there is nothing he can do. He hopes things will improve with the end of the school year, with the first month of vacation, or with his return to school. However, since this does not happen and the second wave of coronavirus knocks on the door again, you decide that you must answer frankly the question of whether your career is worth all this tension. Realizing the answer was no, he quit his job, earning $ 55,000 a year.
At first glance, the decision of the writer who lives in Nebraska is quite risky, since just last month 865,000 women in the United States lost their jobs. The reason is that the coronavirus crisis is hitting the sectors where women traditionally work the hardest, and the chances of them finding a job again quickly are slim. However, this appears to be the lesser evil in the context of the heavy workload women are subjected to during a pandemic.
A survey shows that one in four of them is considering leaving their job due to stress or to be able to take care of their children. It was conducted by the international management consulting firm McKinsey and the Lean In Foundation, founded by Facebook COO Cheryl Sandberg to support working women. The goal of the study is to find out how people are coping with the challenges of the pandemic. 40,000 employees from 317 US companies were surveyed.
From their responses, it was clear that men are less willing to sacrifice their careers to care for their children than their wives. 17 percent of mothers considered reducing their working hours during the pandemic compared to 9 percent of fathers. The difference is almost the same when using the license. The main reason women indicate when leaving a career is childcare, which is explained by their developed sense of responsibility and tendency to take responsibility for failures in their education. Additionally, there are some objective reasons why they are busier during a pandemic. For example, when children are sick, they expect their mother to take care of them.
Usually around 15% of both sexes consider reducing work or leaving, but with the appearance of the coronavirus the percentage in women begins to increase and is now 25, while in men it remains.
Lean In advises companies to reset their goals, change their evaluation criteria, create flexible and part-time work opportunities, and extend deadlines so that their employees have the opportunity to deal with the emergency. If this does not happen, years of efforts to ensure gender diversity in companies could be ruined and millions of women workers could be burned. For the United States alone, the forecast is about two million.
What we learn from this study should terrify all of us, says Cheryl Sandberg. According to her, some companies may decide that it is too luxurious to deal with how to provide better conditions for employees who work with their children, since unemployment is on the rise and they can quickly hire a replacement who will not have such problems. However, they should know that such behavior has a demoralizing effect on the team and disrupts the sense of mission.
The study also found that mothers are three times more likely than fathers to be responsible for most family tasks. They spend an additional three or more hours a day on housework and childcare, which is equivalent to 20 hours a week, or half a work week, in excess of their professional commitment. And while in many families, spouses try to share household responsibilities, research shows that their perceptions of whether this happens are quite different. While 70% of parents think they share them equally with their partner during the coronavirus crisis, only 44% of mothers say the same. 39 percent of women and only 13 percent of men say they are responsible for most of the domestic work.
No studies of this type have been carried out in Bulgaria, but it is known that before the pandemic our country ranked last in terms of part-time women in the EU. Only about two percent of Bulgarian women work less to have time to take care of the family, while in the Netherlands they are 77, in Austria 47 and in Germany 47 percent. And the reason for this is not just low wages, but the children of our country often spend all day in schools. Also, they are often trusted with the help of grandparents, which is rather the exception in Western Europe. However, all of these factors change significantly in a pandemic, and as the incidence of infection increases, so does the risk of overheating among mothers, who will likely have to stay locked up with their children at work for a long time.
Neck ages from looking at the phone for a long time
42% of women admit that they have used their mobile phones much more to receive information since the beginning of the pandemic, and for some it has even caused neck and shoulder pain due to the prolonged flexion of the device, reports the Daily Mail.
A survey commissioned by the cosmetics company Prai Beauty of 2,000 women over the age of 35 found that they checked their phones an average of 13 times an hour.
Three in ten respondents say they suffer from pain and stiffness, a condition that experts call “tech neck.” It is caused by excessive muscle tension.
Almost a quarter of women say their neck is visibly old, which is also believed to be a consequence of their mobile addiction. That is why cosmetic companies are focusing on developing special products that slow down the aging of neck skin.
Yoga trainer Hannah Barrett, on the other hand, says that women can alleviate the symptoms of the so-called “tech neck” through purposeful exercises and by preventing future loading on this delicate area. According to her, it is not surprising how many women suffer from long hours looking at a mobile phone, knowing how many things it is already used for. However, taking care of your neck and posture is important, Barrett adds.
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