Emer Currie (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Happy International Women's Day 2021, or is it 2017?According to a PricewaterhouseCoopers women in work index, progress for women in work could be back to 2017 levels by the end of this year. Some are rightly calling the effect of Covid-19 a global "shecession". The index measures 33 OECD countries across the gender pay gap, labour force participation, women's unemployment and full-time employment. Ireland has mixed results. The gender pay gap has lessened, but the female unemployment rate in 2020 increased at double the rate of men's. For example, that women hold 76% of the jobs in healthcare means they are not only more vulnerable to contracting Covid-19, but also to becoming unemployed because of it. Traditionally, women are more likely to be in temporary, part-time and precarious employment at 26.5% versus 15.1% of males across the EU. Central Statistics Office, CSO, figures tell us that just over 9% of women compared with 0.4% of men took unpaid leave during the pandemic. Women are more vulnerable to redundancies right now and to the long-term economic effect of Covid-19 because of pressures on their time and their Internet bandwidths as well as structural inequalities.

I hope that today is not an exercise in women talking to themselves. We have glaring problems with the gender pay gap, the gender care gap and the lack of investment in public services in care. There are plenty of men and women in the House to have a genuine discussion on the barriers to sharing care work in houses across the country. We need a review of care at every stage of life and investment in our care economy as part of a gender-sensitive recovery. We cannot afford not to. If the statistics around employment do not convince Members, then what about this? Persistent disparities in employment participation cost Europe more than €335 billion per year, or 2.41% of EU GDP in 2019.