The Relentless Times: Exploring Newspaper Discourses on Shecession and Gendered Inequalities

Abstract

The multitude of societal disruptions caused by COVID-19 also includes large-scale unemployment. Both men and women have encountered job losses during the pandemic. However, the inequalities experienced by women in the workfront were intensified due to COVID-19, which led to a disproportionate negative impact on working women. According to International Labor Organization’s new policy brief, the number of employed women has decreased by 13 million from 2019 to 2021 (ILO, 2021). During the pandemic, women have faced a drop of 4.2% in employment, which amounts to 54 million job losses globally. Indeed, there are regional variations to this large-scale employment losses, with the Americas experiencing the worst (9.4%), followed by the Arab states (4.1%), Asia-Pacific (3.8%), Europe-Central Asia (2.5%), and Africa (1.9%). Building forward a fairer global society involves placing gender equality and exploring gender-responsive measures in the forefront of the pandemic recovery efforts. Hence the main aim of this article is to discuss the role of COVID-19 on the lives of working women. In particular, we are interested in exploring a contemporary phenomenon namely “shecession”. In the sections below, we provide a background of the role of working women in the labor market, followed by a discussion of shecession, social time, and intersectionality. In particular, our focus is on identifying the repertoires underlying shecession as well as on examining the role of social time as an agent in shecession. Our study thus contributes to the literature on time, gender, and business ethics by exploring how social time and gender play a role in accentuating inequalities in the labor market and thereby shaping shecession.