Last year, at the very start of the COVID-19 pandemic, we did a project on the pandemic itself. I recorded a podcast about how the US government handled the coronavirus, which you can listen to here. Something I didn’t consider while creating this project was how the pandemic affected women specifically.
A child bride whose story was described in the article.
This past week, we did an activity in class where we each chose an article about an issue that women face, read it, and analyzed it. The article I chose, “Child Marriage, Pregnancies Soar During Pandemic,” by Susanné Bergsten, emphasized how the pandemic had drastically impacted the rate of child marriage. Schools all over the world have closed, and without education, many girls are forced into child marriages and adolescent pregnancies. Over half a million girls are now at risk of child marriage solely because of the pandemic. I never considered topics like this when I was studying the pandemic this year. This made me really curious about other ways the pandemic affected women, so I decided to do more research.
I listened to a podcast from NPR, called “How More Women Than Men Are Being Impacted By The Recession”. It outlined exactly how different this experience is for women than men; in September, over a million people left the workforce in the US. Nearly 86% of them were women. That’s a very high number, and as the podcast outlines, there are several reasons for this.
At the start of the pandemic, many jobs were put on hold, and schools and daycares were closed worldwide. But, even once jobs started reopening, schools across the world were still online. Kids need supervision, and usually, that responsibility, along with many others such as cooking and cleaning, falls on women. They may have had to leave the workforce to take care of their children, losing money and valuable time to advance in their career. This is also a main factor in the longevity of the gender pay gap; women spend less time in the office so they can take care of children, which makes their male coworkers more likely to be promoted.
I’m really glad we’ve been able to do this project on women, as it has helped me connect ideas and see them through the perspective of women throughout the world.
Thanks for reading my blog post!