Archana Prasad
The reason why I chose the title is because, in one of the reports on Ebola virus in Africa, a policy maker asked the question, that can the epidemic be gendered. The answer given to it was that women and men are differently affected by an epidemic outbreak. However, the answer is not as simple. I am calling it ‘engendering’ because any response to a pandemic is calibrated by the existing social, political and economic institutions. Hence, the policy response is also embedded in the same. If that is the case, since the institutions themselves have gender bias, the response is also gendered in character.
Let me explain by three or four examples. In the first phase of the lockdown, news reports came out that domestic violence cases were escalating and that the state had to take efforts to address the situation. Any kind of lockdown puts escalated pressure on women for both paid and unpaid work. Secondly, the government came up with certain guidelines which were insufficient especially in the case of women. Frontline workers are not only healthcare workers but also workers who protect the social reproduction of privileged classes. Even women are workers in their own house by that standard and thereby face the pressure of any kind of lockdown. When the second lockdown happened very violently, due to pressure from womens’ organisations sending memorandums, a social section was added to the revised guidelines which states that once in 15 days Anganwadi workers will do doorstep delivery to people registered under the Anganwadi and that more care should be taken of the elderly and so on. On one side the state is appearing to respond to women’s issues and on the other it isn’t and I will explain this further.
The UN women report on “COVID-19 and its impact on women” suggested certain measures, which according to me are thoroughly inadequate, but it did outline the basic spheres under which we have to look for the impact on women. The first one it outlined was the economic sphere. Even outside India there are countries where women form 74 percent of the informal workforce. Secondly, the schooling from home and working from home and how it puts pressure on women. Even within our circle of fellow academics, they have to log into their workstations during working hours and do homeschooling as 1.5 billion children are sitting at home due to the pandemic. There is no real social backup for this even in the most developed countries. The third aspect the report outlined is the pressure on social reproduction and unpaid work. And the fourth aspect was women in special conflict situations. The report said its studies revealed that the pandemic would reverse the gains of women rights movements. It took examples from Ebola and Nipah virus in Africa, Congo, Liberia and so on where people are rightly arguing that the inequality between men and women have increased due to the outbreak of the epidemic and the lack of a transformative response to that. If you want to have a proper response to the pandemic in a socially just way, it has to address the social inequalities that exist in the society which include inequalities between men and women.
In the case of frontline workers, about 80 percent of all nursing staff across countries in the world are women. In the US itself, 70 percent of nursing staff, more than 50 percent of pharmacists and those who test in the lab are women. These women are the frontline warriors in the healthcare system to defend against the pandemic. Further, the healthcare workers who are impacted by the virus and testing corona positive are mostly women, such as out of 7000 in Spain, 72 percent are women, out of around 10000 in Italy, 68 percent are women. This is because most of the caring of the patients are done by women without any protective gear. There are haunting accounts of nurses, even in developed European countries saying that they are afraid to go to work, not only because they have run out of protective gears but also as there is a sanitary crisis with the gear. When you are wearing the gear with 10 layers, you cannot use the washroom. Earlier they were working for 8 hours, now they are working for 4 shifts which are of shorter duration which means they are working for much longer hours. No one can forget the image on TV where a woman doctor is sleeping in her car because she doesn’t want her own family being vulnerable to the virus. The second image which quite haunted me was the image of 2000 migrant workers in Bandra yesterday. If you look at them, most of them were men. But they have women back home who are taking care of the family and are dependent on the repatriation of money from them. The impact is not only on the healthcare worker but also the unpaid worker who is having to do triple the work than before. In my colony, we have paid domestic help but 99.9 percent of the houses are not employing these workers anymore and most of them have not got their salaries. At the same time the Prime Minister of the country is requesting the people to pay domestic workers their salary but this is not a matter of request but of regulation where you ensure that no one is laid off. Another thing we learn from epidemics earlier is that because women have double and triple the burden of social reproduction, their working hours at paid work are less compared to men. This in turn brings a situation in which after the pandemic, when business starts opening up, the employment of women plummets and this has happened in many places in Africa. Hence, it is not just a question of whether less women died compared to men or not.
The issue about domestic violence reveals that there are estimates of 243 million cases across the world which seems to me as an understatement. In Singapore and Hong Kong, within the first week of coronavirus, they recorded a 30 percent increase in violence. In Spain, within the first two weeks about 12.4 percent increase in just the formal calls and then an increase of 270 percent. In France, 30 percent increase, in Australia another 30 percent increase. In Italy it is even more horrific as women are facing abuse but do not want to talk about the violence because the survival crisis is so severe. If the survival crisis is so severe they do not want to worsen the crisis by talking about the violence in their households and many women’s groups are trying to encourage women to stand against it. There are countries where complaint centres are made in grocery stores to encourage women to talk about abuse (I am not sure if it is working or not) and even pharmacists are allowed to record calls with anonymous complaints. Hence, it is not just the police who are responsible as it isn’t just a law and order problem but a social coalition and a social solidarity is required to tackle the pandemic.
Further, talking about the responses of governments regarding the pandemic, by April 5th, about 105 governments had announced some sort of an economic package for assistance. Some of them did focus on lactating mothers and other vulnerable sections, but if we divide these responses, is when the important picture comes out. 8.6 percent of the policies were mere wage subsidies which the government refuses to give to women and informal sector workers, 18.9 percent were insurance based policies largely for medical personnel, 6 percent were labour market based policies which basically says that you cannot fire people and you have to pay them wages. 22 percent were social assistance policies such as pensions, subsidies and so on. A bulk of the policies are failed cash transfers especially in developing countries (except Brazil when things were better). You transfer cash and you absolve yourself of the responsibility. Largely the response of India has been through cash transfers and some promises for PDS transfer with no focus on women, for people under BPL list, for free healthcare you have to be on Ayushman Bharat and an insulting 500 rupees for women’s self help group accounts and many of the Jan Dhan accounts. Hence, what we really see is that there is a very low level response on the institutional backup so that their burden can be eased. I mean to say that the government when they depend largely on women’s informal labour for partial food and care services like in Anganwadis, they owe them a better institutional response. The unions for women have to step up for regularising the paid caregivers into the government service and open neighbourhood assistance for women who are overburdened by the pandemic. That would not only lead to a momentary response but also help to ramp up the care infrastructure which have been done by a lot of socialist countries who have set up neighbourhood committees and ramped up primary healthcare centres to survive the pandemic. In the case of ASHA workers we are risking their lives by making them frontline workers without any job security or protective backup even in terms of their health. Hence, in order to have a better institutional response all volunteer and full time workers, including Anganwadi, mid day meal workers, midwives, contract workers including nursing staff and safai-karamcharis have to be regularised and neighbourhood system of care institutionalised, we move one step forward towards the socialisation of care itself.
All the difficulties that even developed countries are facing are because of the reversal of their public healthcare policies in favour of private healthcare. In Fact the reason why the US is in such a big mess is because it does not have a public healthcare system. Public healthcare does not only mean good government hospitals but also have a proper neighbourhood care system. We can only find an answer to this pandemic (I am sure it will go and probably come back) this way as it presents a crisis within the system. Hence, the proper response is to regularise the existing cadre that you have and upgrade its infrastructure to have proper care facilities in the neighbourhood. Even in 1940’s, the women’s sub-committee of the National Planning Committee had suggested this but the bourgeois rulers ignored the recommendation.
As far as the employment situation of women is concerned, it has plummeted even in the informal sector. More and more women are getting into debt and that debt is infact one of the most terrible bondages becasue it puts you at risk of various sexual abuse and assaults. In fact the debt of the family and women is going to grow with the pandemic.Therefore it is essential that the subsidies take matter of this. The wage subsidies should look into for the extra care work that women do and some amount of compensation has to be made. The interest subsidy should ensure relief to poor households especially farming households who are going to suffer badly not because of COVID-19 cases but because the supply chains are completely cut off due to the un-thoughout lockdown. Another 20 days of lockdown will only put these small households and small business more in debt and put greater burden on unpaid family work even for enterprises and I wont be surprised if child labour also grows because of this. So, the salary subsidy or basic income support for the next six months is the least we can ask for.
Further, the government should not be so stingy to only provide ration to BPL list (which is a highly flawed list) which haven’t been done anywhere except Kerala. The unlocking of the godowns and free distribution of grains is highly necessary. Further, the question of lockdown is a very class oriented notion as suggested by many doctors also. Sainath was saying about how there is no social distancing in slums. In social media there are posts going about to be aware of your maids as they may give you a virus. However, it is not the poor working class who gave the virus to the country. If we had sealed the airports we could have controlled the virus. So why jail the entire nation without having a proper plan of action. Why not plan for better public transport systems, better working conditions where health, hygiene and a certain amount of physical distancing is maintained. Social distancing as a term in effect, is distancing from the most deprived of the society and widening the inequality between the salaried upper middle class and the contracted workers and daily wage workers and women in all situations.
The UN women’s report does not, curiously enough, talk about these issues. It only says three things that; one, women should be represented in any committee that is going to make a recovery or governmental response to a pandemic; two, they should be the target group; and third, that there should be an economic recovery package. But it is woefully silent on the institutional response to pandemic, and why I am stressing on this is because when we take those steps it makes our society a step better on the whole. Apart from ill thought out plans of rolling money into accounts, people do need money in their hands for now, but we also should think of what after that. Migrant workers need transport facilities to go back to their homes but we also need to provide support structures for their families after the pandemic to not just survive but better their well being. These questions have to be raised to the ruling classes attitude towards the pandemic. It is all very well to say that we the people should be united, and we should be united, but this unity should not put a burden on the most marginalised groups, all the working classes and especially women across all these sections. Women are not natural caretakers and if we want a truly modern society, care-giving has to be equally distributed. This can happen only if the character of the family changes and there is an institutionalised collective response to the question of care also. Otherwise the aftermath of the pandemic would be really bad for women who are already very vulnerable. Standard operating procedures for tackling domestic violence is necessary and something we have fought for for long. But the only way of also addressing the question for women is to enable them to come out in secure safe situations where they can do what they want to do.
Therefore, lockdown is not a solution for the pandemic or the problem that women face, and the impact of it on women is quite scary. We need a collective discussion amongst us about what should be done in the wake of the pandemic because the way things are, pandemic is going to keep coming and society is going to keep falling into crisis. The pandemic may be one crisis, but the economic crisis that follows also has to be tackled. Further, pandemic should not be used as a way of advancing the most socially conservative ideologies of the country. We can see that the pandemic is not just stifling dissent but also furthering the interests of highly socially conservative ideologies, more specifically the BJP and its fringe organisations. The way in which the lockdown is being implemented and the fear that is continuously being put by the media and the government itself is really scary. With the BJP we already have the revival of neo-conservative forces and if the lockdown is going to be used as a method to strengthen these forces and make the communities more gated, inhuman and unsafe then the task before the womens’ movement is going to increase a lot. The womens’ movement is up against a wall and the pandemic is going to make it worse. We need to discuss between ourselves what our response is going to be towards this, some which we can do which we are doing also and some which we have to demand from the state. Lastly, as far as financing for these suggestions go,we should have a covid tax on the private industry instead of bailing them out, as they have milked us enough and their crocodile tears shouldn’t fool us because their surplus is enormous. They should cut down on their surpluses and support workers through better working conditions, childcare facilities, maternity benefits and so on. And the government should force them to do it instead of pleading with them to donate to PM cares funds.
The response to the pandemic is a socially calibrated response and we have to join forces to make sure that the social calibration is loaded in favour of progressive forces and women.
Inquilab Zindabad!
This is the full transcript of the online lecture given by Prof Archana Prasad, faculty at the Centre for Informal Sector and Labour Studies (CISLS) of the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. The transcript was prepared by Anjana Hemanth Kumar, Masters student at CISLS. The lecture was organised by the SFI-JNU Unit on April 16. The video recording can be accessed here.
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