4.6 Inclusion considerations for females
‘The United Nations’ report Progress on the Sustainable Development Goals: The gender snapshot 2021 [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] highlighted that the pandemic has not only dented progress in key goals on gender equality but also reversed progress in expanding the rights of women worldwide.
The video below summaries the key findings of the report.
Download this video clip.Video player: Progress on the Sustainable Development Goals: The Gender Snapshot 2021 (Please note this video has no spoken audio.)
Progress on the Sustainable Development Goals: The Gender Snapshot 2021 (Please note this video has no spoken audio.)
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While there has always been an awareness of female equality and equity in the workplace, organisations need to consider how they can support closing the gap in their approach to new ways of working, and work to understand the needs of females.
In the videos below Natasha Davies, Policy and Research Lead from Chwarae Teg, who works to ensure women in Wales can enter and thrive in the workplace, and Samantha Hawtin, Research Student, The Open University, whose work focuses on the importance of place in the workplace, provide insights for what organisations should consider.
Download this video clip.Video player: hyb_1_2022_sep117_overview_of_inclusion_for_women_natasha_davies.mp4
Transcript
NATASHA DAVIES
I’m Natasha Davies. I’m the policy and research lead at Chwarae Teg. We’re a gender equality charity based in Wales. We work with women, businesses, decision makers to identify the challenges that keep contributing to gender inequality in Wales that keep holding women back and identifying and delivering the solutions to overcome that inequality.
Our work is focused around three key areas-- women in the economy, women represented, and women at risk. We have a world that is still incredibly shaped by gender. Gender inequality is still very prevalent in our society and in our economy. We still got a gender pay gap.
We still see women less likely to be in work. Women who are in formal employment are more likely to be in part-time, low-paid, and precarious work. They’re underrepresented in particular sectors, in senior positions. And outside of work, we see the women are still overwhelmingly taking on the responsibilities for unpaid work and unpaid care, which in turn is shaping their ability to engage with the formal labour market.
So I think inclusion, in relation to gender inequality, would see that inequality addressed. That inequality simply wouldn’t exist anymore. Our workplaces would be flexible, welcoming, safe for everybody, free from discrimination, harassment. And as a result of inclusion, women, all women would see fair and equitable outcomes in terms of pay, their working conditions, and the types of jobs and sectors that they’re able to work in or that they are working in.
As a result of the unpaid work that women are taking on, obviously, that has an impact on their time. So a lot of women are time poor. That affects obviously their ability to engage with work. Are they able to work full time? Do they have to be available to pick the kids up from school, to drop the kids off to school? Do they need to have the ability to pop out of work throughout the day because they’re responsible for picking up the prescriptions from the pharmacist or organising the doctors appointments?
But that also has what generally is referred to as the mental load. That impact as well. So women are not only doing this unpaid work, they’re coordinating, managing, organising this unpaid work. If they have a partner, often they’re managing that household, essentially, which again, has an impact on their time because we know that takes time and brain space away from us.
But it also has a very real impact on women’s mental and emotional health as well and something that I really think became quite acute during the pandemic, for example, where we saw even more of that unpaid work falling onto women in quite stereotypical ways. The pandemic and new ways of working have had a massive impact on women and will require new ways and new approaches from business leaders, from organisations as we go forward, because there’s been quite an immediate shift but that shift is ongoing.
I think it’s probably fair to say that the pandemic has accelerated a shift in ways of working that was probably underway already. Organisations, like Chwarae Teg, we’ve been talking about the need for more flexible, agile, remote, inclusive ways of working for a long time, and the pandemic kind of forced the issue, particularly in relation to remote work because we had no choice other than to support many workers to work from home.
So I think it really challenged a lot of perceptions about what is and isn’t possible, dispelled some of the myths, I guess, around productivity, might go down if people aren’t in the office. How can I trust people to be doing the work that they say that they’re doing? So the pandemic kind of shifted that quite significantly.
I think, from our perspective, we’d say that the shift is happening whether we like it or not. What’s important now is that we steer it in a way that results in greater equality and inclusion within the workplace. Because actually just left to roll out by itself, that’s not necessarily a guarantee. We don’t want to be in a situation where we’re switching from an old one size fits all approach, where we have everybody in the office in the same hours every day of the week, to a new one size fits all, where we have the exact same working patterns but people are just sat at their desks at home instead.
So I think it’s really important as we move forward that anybody who’s involved in structuring and organising workplaces are prioritising issues like autonomy and choice, thinking about how people’s different circumstances might affect how they experience changes in how we work and the shift to hybrid working. It’s really important that equality is built in from the start. Really simple things like asking staff what they think, how they found working from home during the pandemic and post-pandemic, what they think might be best going forward.
And I think it’s also important that, if we’re in workplaces where, perhaps, we don’t have as diverse a workforce as we’d like, to really understand how these changes might impact different people. Reaching out to specialist, equality groups, exploring research that’s already being done to really try and understand what the impact of changes might be, and then using tools like equality impact assessments to think to consider how those changes might impact different people, and putting in place ways of measuring the impact, so as we further evolve and adapt ways of working, we can change our approach if needed to mitigate any negative impacts and seize any opportunities to really embed equality inclusion in this new world of work.
In order to get to more equitable, inclusive, fair workplaces, there are lots of things that need to shift and there are lots of actors that can take action to deliver change. The progress we’ve made-- we have made progress. Chwarae Teg, 30 years old, we’ve certainly made progress since we were first set up and that has been helped with people who have really, I suppose, led the charge as it were and acted as role models and smashed down some of those barriers and glass ceilings for others who are coming up.
And I think there are some things that individuals who find themselves coming up against barriers-- there are sources of support. There are schemes and initiatives out there that work directly with underrepresented groups to give them the skills, the confidence, the qualifications to be able to progress. There are measures within larger organisations, networks, and initiatives that bring people together to work collectively to identify what the problems are and demonstrate to senior leaders what the problems are and hopefully, push for change.
But I think ultimately what does need to happen is that we need to be fixing the system. So it isn’t falling down to individuals to fight hard and perhaps change how they work in order to thrive in a system that ultimately hasn’t been designed with their needs in mind.
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Download this video clip.Video player: hyb_1_2022_sep118_context_for_inclusion_for_women_samantha_hawtin.mp4
Transcript
SAMANTHA HAWTIN
While working through the pandemic, the experience for males and females has been significantly different. Women have been disproportionately burdened with the majority of housework. In fact, 45% of mothers have done 90% to 100% of childcare and unpaid labour during the pandemic. So this has resulted in women reducing their working hours four to five times more than males during this time.
This is particularly concerning as some commentators have said that ways of living and working and equality between men and women has regressed to a standard seen in the 1950s. And this is particularly concerning as the gender pay gap has stalled in the last five years. And in 2022, the figure for the gender pay gap was 15.4%.
As we’ve seen in recent months, there’s been a huge availability of positions offering either flexible working or hybrid working. And these positions have proved hugely popular with female employees as it offers them flexibility surrounding their work, their home life commitments. This is obviously advantageous because it means that many women can go into employment.
However, some commentators have said that not being present in the office as much is detrimental for their career progression. So there’s concern that this flexibility may be adopted at the expense of their future career prospects, and leading to greater gender inequality.
So the key challenge is in terms of returning to work are that many inequalities have been embedded during the pandemic, and there’s concerns that when people return to their routines that these inequalities may persist and continue in their future working arrangements and home life arrangements. And there’s concern that women may still be juggling work alongside home life and particularly adopting working from home and experiencing the same difficulties they were during the pandemic due to having to juggle both home and work life.
So in terms of the experience for women with or without children, it’s been shown in research that women disproportionately take on the burden of paid and unpaid labour. So this affects women both with and without children. So with women with children, obviously have the additional responsibility of childcare issues as well. But there’s the concern that this flexibility will make it easier for women to take on these additional responsibilities due to the flexibility and that these roles will more easily fall to women by default.
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Activity 14: How flexible can you be as an organisation?
Timing: 10 minutes
Many women have more time commitments outside the workplace, with responsibilities ranging from looking after children, ageing family members, managing the household, which not only can lead to difficulties managing their time in the workplace and home, due to having to work around ‘fixed hours’ (such as school hours, health care and financial service providers hours), which may cause anxieties about how they are perceived in the workplace, and impact their wellbeing.
Read Agile-and-Inclusive-Working-Practices.pdf (chwaraeteg.com) and consider the videos from this section.
What can organisations do to enable more flexibility and create a more supportive culture for women in the workplace, which allows them to be open to what they may help with when managing personal commitments? Make notes in the box below.
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