Romanian Women Find Work-From-Home Culture a Mixed Blessing

These imbalances were already present in society. In 2018, an OECD report said women had far less access to the internet and to a smartphone than men, while a UN women's report concluded that 1.7 billion women from countries with low and middle incomes didn't have a mobile phone at all.

A UN policy brief, "The Impact of COVID-19 on Women", published in April 2020 said certain worrying patterns had meanwhile emerged whose economic effects were being felt especially by women and girls.

The health of women generally was being adversely impacted, unpaid care work had increased and gender-based violence was rising, it said, - these trends all further amplified by the fragile social cohesion, lack of institutional capacity and high levels of unpredictability in the context of the global health crisis.

Analysis done by McKinsey & Company in 2020, "COVID-19 and gender equality: Countering the regressive effects", concurs. It states that "women's jobs are 1.8 times more vulnerable to this crisis than men's jobs. While women make up 39 per cent of global employment, they account for 54 per cent of overall job losses".

Women are not only more vulnerable to Covid-19-related economic effects, but the nature of their work also remains very gender specific, it said. In essence, COVID-19 had "disproportionately increased the time women spend on family responsibilities".

Women lose far more jobs than men

Illustration. Photo: Unsplash/Engin Akyurt

Romania has been no exception to these concerning trends. According to the National Institute of Statistics, INS, no less than two-thirds of the Romanians who have lost their jobs since the pandemic started are women.

While the number of unemployed men over...