Nursery closures, job losses and home schooling have all affected women this year. But there is a way forward
It’s a bittersweet thing, watching your baby fall in love with someone else. But for working parents, that’s the dream: finding a childminder or nursery worker your child is so thrilled to see every morning that you can slip away almost unnoticed. When the chemistry is right you’d give anything to sustain it, which is why childcare providers going bust isn’t quite the same as other businesses going under. It’s not just nursery workers whose jobs go up in smoke, painful as that is, but small children’s sense of security and sometimes their parents’ working lives too. Each closure represents some family’s precious house of cards collapsing. So why isn’t there more fuss over a survey showing one in six early years providers say they may not last the year, thanks to Covid-19?
The all-party parliamentary group on women and work, jointly chaired by Labour’s Jess Phillips and Tory rising star Laura Farris, will shortly publish the findings of a detailed inquiry spelling out the impact of the pandemic on working women’s lives. As they make clear, this goes well beyond the manic days of lockdown, when many mothers took on the lion’s share of home schooling and toddler wrangling while still attempting to do their actual jobs, and consequently lived in fear of getting fired. (On which note, the report will call for redundancies during the pandemic to be recorded by protected characteristics – which should show if women, or workers of colour, or people with disabilities are being singled out unfairly.) The real problem is what happened next: Farris, a former employment lawyer hardly given to wild exaggeration, warned in parliament last week that “we are on the brink of a bloodbath in terms of female employment”, with the economic impact of Covid looking decidedly unequal.
