Crisis After Crisis: The Pandemic and Women’s Work

Abstract

The pandemic has resulted in severe dislocations in the lives of many women workers especially the poor and the neglected, exacerbating the ‘chronic crisis’ in the everyday existence of the workers to unprecedented proportions. Evidences from the ground signal desperate times with women workers facing severe unemployment, reduced incomes and adverse conditions of work. The article argues that the crisis of women’s work caused by COVID-19 is not a sudden tragic consequence of the pandemic, but an outcome of pre-existing structural and systemic ruptures. For long, women have confronted, exclusion and precarious employment opportunities resulting from anti-women attitude at workplaces with lack of acknowledgement and attempts to address the deep-rooted structural fault lines leading to systemic failures. After giving the larger background that are important in the understanding of women’s employment in the context of the pandemic, the article gives an overview of women’s employment during the pandemic taking up two specific sectors that are particularly marked—paid domestic work and frontline community workers (ASHA and Anganwadi workers) are examined in detail. The article suggests that the COVID-19 pandemic has further exacerbated and personalised the endemic context of crisis for women calling for state intervention at the time to correct systemic issues that have positioned women unequally in employment. JEL Codes: A14, B54, F66, J01, J21