Second Sex Redux: The Impact of Unpaid Labour

Thirty years of women’s labour in the workplace and society just disappeared overnight. According to the Center for American Progress, we are back to the late 80s levels of women in the labour force.1 During the pandemic, women have regressed, making the tough decision to let go of hard-earned careers to stay at home. Women are now doing significantly more domestic chores and family care than men.2 “Everything we work for that has taken 25 years could be lost in a year,” said the UN Women Deputy Executive Director Anita Bhatia to the BBC in November 2020.3 Gender parity is quickly becoming a myth — women have consolidated themselves to be the second sex à la Simone De Beauvoir.

The pandemic has made women less important — if anything, society has taken women for granted. Women are burnt out. They’re on the brink of multiple breakdowns, struggling to keep themselves and their families afloat. If this pandemic has shown women anything, it is that society takes women for granted. Doctor Lakshmin from The New York Times couldn’t have said it better:

It is not uncommon for my patients to say things like, “I should be doing more.” It’s one way that women have internalized a culture that demands they bear the brunt of caregiving while simultaneously devaluing that job.4

History is synonymous with patriarchal enforcement, and the pandemic has only reinforced this. As a woman of the pandemic, I’m not surprised — just incredibly disappointed.

Moral Licensing the #MeToo Movement

Firstly, let’s investigate the idea of importance. This ‘importance’ has been bestowed to women by society — an intrinsically patriarchal society. The ‘importance’ therefore bestowed upon women is through a patriarchal narrative, one that is self-serving to men. Ultimately, this ‘importance’ is passive, a self-congratulatory pat on the back and what psychology calls ‘moral licensing.’5

Moral licensing can be summed up in this perfect analogy. In 2008, the first African American president, Obama, was elected. Eight years later Trump, a bona fide racist, was elected. Let’s think for a moment that Americans patted themselves on the back by doing the right thing — electing the first African American President. They’d risen to a moral high ground by achieving this, and now they could display completely contradictory behaviour with ease. It’s the sort of cognitive dissonance that says, “I gave to charity so I can now no longer look at homeless people” — an ultimate moral surplus.

Think about what happened before the pandemic — women were celebrating the victories of the #MeToo movement. Out of women’s trauma, society, specifically men, finally realized that their experience wasn’t universal. Women were experiencing an ulterior reality that was being valued as significantly less.

By 2018, men suddenly felt the need to change. According to the Harvard Business Review, ‘77% of men anticipated being more careful about potentially inappropriate behaviour’, and 74% of women said ‘they thought they would be more willing now to speak against harassment.’

The pandemic rips through society overnight. Everyone moves to work at home, schools go online, and women leave the workforce to go and take care of the children. Yes, some women keep their remote work but still have to juggle the household chores. Remember, men haven’t relieved women from the burden.

If the US congress (where women only comprise 23.6% of the 535 members)8 had issued a $1,400 stimulus cheque at the beginning of the pandemic, perhaps families would’ve felt less like they were drowning. The simple fact of having more income in a moment when income is precarious would’ve done wonders to the financial and mental situations of families. However, despite the growing studies indicating women’s ambitions ‘plummeting’9 and burn outgrowing, governments have decided to stall on aid.

Now, let’s view this through the lenses of moral licensing. Society (read: men) had achieved a sizeable moral surplus after the #MeToo movement and therefore let women fail during the pandemic. If we follow this train of thought, I ponder if society was ever going to be help women — if they were always inherently doomed to fail due to this moral licensing.

This thought experiment ultimately shows how devalued women are and continue to be. That ‘importance’ never existed. It was an ideology peddled by the patriarchy, setting up women to fail.

Re-Inventing Unpaid Labour

Women can still recapture this importance. Yet, it must be different from the pre-pandemic era. Society cannot bestow it upon women again — it must be reclaimed and owned. McKinsey estimated that global GDP growth ‘could be $1 trillion lower in 2030 than it would be if women’s employment simply tracked that of men in each sector.’10 That’s a concrete enough reason to break down where women can reclaim their importance.

A crucial part of post-pandemic recovery must be investing in women. A vital characteristic this pandemic highlighted was the quantity of unremunerated women’s labour. Generally, you’re compensated for your labour. By not being paid for labour, the labour is automatically lacking importance. As domestic labour is unpaid, does this negate its significance?

McKinsey determined that the value of ‘unpaid-care work done by women is $10 trillion or 13% of global GDP.’11 By inherently recognizing unpaid labour, you realize its importance, leading to a better balance between genders. One way to intervene post-pandemic would be to develop employer-or- state funded childcare or tax policies that would advocate both parents to work. In developing countries, an idea would be to create institutionalized childcare — this would create employment whilst alleviating the problem.

The Post-Pandemic Woman

These are significant policy changes that would go a long way to creating gender parity and restoring women’s sense of importance. However, the most prominent paradigm to change will be attitudinal biases — after all, as De Beauvoir said it, “one is not born a woman, but rather becomes one.”12 Simply looking through the lenses of moral licensing, we can see the long-lasting paradoxical impact of the #MeToo movement. Change won’t be simple, but it has to be done — for the economy, for women now and the future of women.