Guest Post - Equity from the Inside Out: Aligning Workplace Practices with Gender Realities

By AnnaLise Trudell and Louise Pitre

Pillar Nonprofit Network thanks AnnaLise and Louise for contributing their expertise to Pillar’s Executive Director Support Network and their work on this guest post. 

The nonprofit sector has been a leader in advocating for equity, particularly in pushing for systemic change at multiple levels of government and in advocating for the needs of their clients. But what about the staff? What about the differential impacts of COVID-19 experienced by staff? How has equity been centred in the policies and practices of organizations?

While gender equity seems for many to have become a fight of the past, an ‘old hat’ conversation that pales in comparison to so many other pressing equity issues we face today, the pandemic has exposed that the gender fault lines still exist and risk getting worse if we don’t pay attention to this issue.

COVID-19 has disproportionally impacted women. Between overrepresentation in job losses, in essential service workers and in COVID-19 cases, as well as the increased burden of childcare falling to them, women are feeling the weight of the inequities. Even more so, particular women are feeling that weight. Racialized women are overrepresented in frontline and service jobs, and there is clear data now showing an association between COVID rates and neighbourhoods with large Black populations.

• In March 2020, 63% of job losses were experienced by women
• In May 2020, as the economy started to open up, jobs returned faster for men (2.4% increase) than for women (1.1% increase).
• Women earn $0.87 for every dollar earned by men
• During COVID, employment among women with toddlers or school-aged children fell 7% (vs. 4%men) between February-May
• Women spend an average of 2.5 hrs/day more on all unpaid-work activities than men: 5.4 versus 2.9 hours.
• 56% of the cases and 54% of the deaths from COVID-19 have been experienced by women
• COVID-19 rates are disproportionately high in Indigenous communities, “because of their over-representation in essential occupations in the care sector, a lack of culturally-responsive health care services, and systemically racist health care systems that devalue and deprioritize their needs” (Sultana & Ravanera 2020)
• 56% of women workers (vs. 17% men) are concentrated in occupations known as the 5Cs: caring, cashiering, catering, cleaning and clerical functions, many of which are deemed essential occupations
• Racialized workers made up 42% of personal support workers, double the rate of racialized communities in Ontario at 23%
• Some reports show up to 30% increase in domestic violence rates across the country

These stats all intertwine- women lost jobs at a higher rate because they occupied parts of the economy (the 5Cs) that were hit by this recession, because they bear most of the childcare responsibilities at home, and because they typically make less than their male counterparts so on an individual household perspective, they made the most sense to take the time off to do childcare. This intertwining is especially challenging for Ontario’s nonprofit sector, as the vast majority of its workers are women. 

Let’s imagine a scenario for a moment, one that many women and their organizations will face come the fall. 

Your 7 yearold child’s classmate receives a positive Covid-19 test, and your child is required to isolate at home for 14 days. While you are not required to also isolate, your child can’t stay home alone and you as the mother need to stay with them.

As a workplace, you ask this woman to use her time-related benefits (sick days/vacation) to cover this. But she may already have used those up while she had to stay home with her child from March-August. If her time-related benefits are exhausted, your policy is that she take an unpaid leave.

On an individual level, this may seem fair of the organization. We need to ask who the burden of care falls to-the individual woman, the organization (eg continuing to pay her), or government (eg increasing number of sick days or other financial benefit)? Because it is much too easy to make this burden a ‘neutral’ issue, simply a human resources policy, when in reality our equity approaches need to do the hard work of linking the macro consequences for women to our individual organization’s policies. When we download the burden on the worker, the reality is that we exert a form of oppression—we contribute to the systemic reality that women bear the brunt of COVID-19, we contribute to all of the stats listed above.