Gendered crises?: Bringing in the voices of women in the workforce in the times of health, social, economic and other global crises

Abstract

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has exposed many vulnerabilities and inequalities in the social, economic and political domains, and has brought to light a long-standing truth: women are among the most affected demographic groups in times of crises simply by the virtue of their sex (United Nations, 2020). Despite all the efforts (scholarly and otherwise) to address gender equality pre-crises, times like the current pandemic appear to rapidly deprive women of the opportunities only recently gained and threaten to deepen the gender gap even further. The focus of this panel is on women in the workforce in times of crises and the various impacts of health, social economic and other global crises on these women’s professional and personal lives. Layoffs and furloughs, pay-cuts, changed ‘work orders’ (e.g. virtual work), increased family care responsibilities, including home schooling children while maintaining a full-time work schedule are only some of the challenges that the women have been reported to face during COVID-19. Anecdotal evidence from social media and grey literature suggests that that impact on women is far greater than on men, to the extent that the current pandemic is claimed to be a ‘gendered crisis’ (see UNESCO, 2020). In this panel we take a broader view of the impact of crises on working women and acknowledge that at least for some women crisis times present opportunities to cross social and ideological structural barriers and to play a central role leading changes and decision-making across social domains. Women, for example, have been shown to be more likely to rise to positions of leadership in times of crisis, arguably due to their interpersonal skills and successful management of uncertainty, which has been referred to as the ‘glass cliff phenomenon’ (e.g. Sabharwal, 2015). The overarching aim of the panel is to examine, through the lenses of language and communication, the role that women in the workforce play in dealing with the challenges and the opportunities of global crises. The panel showcases the multiple realities of women in the workforce drawing on empirical data from a diversity of cultural contexts, women in different professions and occupations, job roles and sectors, across age range and gender orientations. Employing a range of pragmatic approaches (e.g. narrative inquiry, discourse analysis, conversation analysis, corpus analysis), the papers in the panel examine the issues of decision-making, leadership, uncertainty, crises communication, (hegemonic) femininity, negotiation of identities, roles and responsibilities in times of crises, female power and solidarity, among others. The panel foregrounds the importance of bringing in the ‘female voices’ not just to rectify the gender inequalities, but to find more effective solutions and responses, and to build a more resilient world in times of crises.

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