COMMENT | The economic cost of being a woman during the pandemic

COMMENT | At the start of the pandemic, in trying to mobilise an all-encompassing societal fight against Covid-19, many governments, organisations and leaders tried to rally citizens behind the following sentiment - we are all in the same boat. We are all in this together. Kita jaga kita (We’ll look after each other).

Very quickly, however, we realised that we are all not in the same boat in the storm – some are only on rafts, some are barely floating, and some are in luxury yachts. And what became most clear after a while was that most of our boats are, in fact, being steered by women.

Women constitute around 49 percent of the Malaysian population. We are nurses and doctors, leaving our own loved ones at home to treat you and yours when you get sick. We are your teachers and lecturers, pivoting to providing the best online education we can, mostly without any prior training.

We are your cleaners, picking up after you and your trash every single day. We cook your food, build the products you use at home, and we are the voices who answer when you call customer service. We are mothers, keeping a household together by doing 50 things at once.

We are your delivery food riders, we get you your online shopping packages, we fly your planes, we drive you around the city. We take care of communities and help distribute aid to people in need. We are a huge part of the global economy. We are everywhere.

Decades of progress, undone

Let’s take a look at what’s been happening with working women - say, a new graduate who makes about RM2,000 a month. Recent data for Malaysia showed that almost a third of employed women in Malaysia were in services and sales – about 29 percent in 2018.

Many sectors that employ women, such as the hotel line and food and beverage, require a physical presence. Systematic discrimination against women has also caused women to primarily occupy jobs at the bottom of an organisation.

These jobs were amongst the first to be done away with when the economy sank into a recession, leaving many women without a source of livelihood. In many ways, this represents more than a loss of income – it is also a loss of independence...