Around the world, working women are facing brutally hard choices about whether to stay home with their children, if they haven’t already been laid off.As if working mothers did not have enough to worry about, experts are now sounding the alarm that progress toward gender equality may be the latest in a long list of casualties of the coronavirus pandemic.: women without children are much closer to parity with men when it comes to salaries and promotions, but mothers pay a large career penalty.
“The bottom line is that based on decades of research we know that there was one institution that was effective at limiting gender inequality and encouraging women’s participation in the workplace, and it was early childhood education,” said Claudia Olivetti, an economist at Dartmouth College.Substantial research has shown that women without children are much closer to parity with men when it comes to salaries and promotions, but mothers pay a large career penalty.
The Israeli government provides free early childhood education from age 3, and means-tested day care for many babies and younger toddlers. As a consequence, before the pandemic, women’s overall labor force participation had reached 74 percent, significantly higher than the O.E.C.D. average of 66 percent, according to a recentfrom the Taub Center for Social Policy Studies, an Israeli think tank. The gender wage gap, though persistent, was narrowing.
Women already held more precarious positions in the work force — working fewer hours, for less money, with shorter tenures and in lower-ranking jobs than men. The loss of child care limited many working mothers’ hours and availability even further, meaning they were often the first to be selected for layoffs and unpaid leave, the report concluded.
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