Relevant for SOCIOLOGY Syllabus-
Emerging issues: ageing, sex ratios, child and infant mortality, reproductive health.
Violence against Women
NEWS IN SHORT
Women make up the majority of workers in the health and social welfare sectors globally.
Unequal distribution of unpaid care work between women and men is a major barrier to women’s empowerment in Asia and the Pacific. The novel coronavirus diseases (COVID-19) pandemic has increased women’s burden of unpaid care work
Globally, women make up the majority of workers in the health and social welfare sectors. Nearly one in three women work in agriculture and do three times as much unpaid care-work at home as men.
The proportion of “unpaid work per day is far higher for women than men globally, while in the case of India, on average 66 per cent of women’s work is unpaid,” according to the World Economic Forum.
SOCIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE
Syllabus: Women’s Health
- Feminist research in economics has consistently highlighted the ways production depends on paid and unpaid work. Social reproductionincludes the day-to-day work assigned largely to women — household labour, physical and emotional caregiving, and other work to meet human needs — required to ‘maintain existing life and to reproduce the next generation’. Without the day-to-day work of social reproduction, entire social systems would collapse.
- The value of women’s paid and unpaid labour is increasingly apparent with the spread of COVID-19: as schools close, the role of teachers — disproportionately women — and public education as a mechanism of support and caregiving for families is laid bare, as women working for pay scramble to arrange childcare.
- Across many countries, women — especially women of colour — are overrepresented among low-wage workers on the front line during the COVID-19 crisis.
- Many have no choice but to go to work even when they are at risk of contracting the virus or they are sick, and they cannot telecommute. Nurses — disproportionately women — and other first responders must continue to work for pay.
- Women in grocery stores, where task segregation often places them in face-to-face interactions with customers, are essential workers and are newly being recognized as such