COVID-19’s Impacts on Racialized Women in the Workforce

Written by Ibnat Islam

It’s no surprise that COVID-19 has taken a significant toll on Canada’s workforce. In many ways, the pandemic has had immense effects on various fields of work. For some marginalized peoples, especially in service industries, the amount of labour required at their job because of new COVID-guidelines has intensified. Even so, unemployment rates have risen significantly. As smaller businesses are swallowed up by the ever-growing domination of corporations, many of the country’s most marginalized peoples scurry to their last few chances at employment at said corporations. And if it’s the most marginalized that are left to teeter between unemployment and minimum wage work at a chain supermarket, then it’s understandable that the same group of people would constitute a large portion of Canada’s unemployment statistics throughout the pandemic. At the centre of these employment issues are racialized women, who are amongst the most affected by the pandemic’s impact on the workforce.

Women have had to bear the brunt of the pandemic in many ways, and the statistics we now have are just the tip of the iceberg. In March, women between the ages 25 to 54 made up 70% of the losses in employment. On the other end of this, women working healthcare and social assistance jobs make up 80% of these sectors, and their workload and stress have increased significantly. Women also constitute 69% of the education sector jobs and 59% of the food industry jobs, both of which are frontline work with added workload amidst the pandemic. Even as restrictions began easing up over spring, women were not seeing a return to the workforce to the same extent as men. Men’s employment in May increased by 2.4% but this was only 1.1% for women.

It’s important to understand that the impacts of the pandemic are not evenly spread out across all women in Canada. Racialized and working-class women have been disproportionately affected, and this is especially seen through their participation in the formal and informal work sectors. It is mostly working-class women of colour working in fields that have been hit hard by the pandemic. Nursing, for instance, is taken up by many working-class immigrant women. It’s a frontline job with a workload that’s seen an extreme increase throughout COVID-19. While many immigrant women have had to step up as frontline workers due to the pandemic, there was still an overall decrease of 12.5% for immigrant women in the workforce. This is compared to a 7% decrease for Canadians, and 8% decrease for immigrant men.

There’s a consistent pattern of women being overrepresented in frontline services and underrepresented in the rest of the workforce. In the fields of work that continue throughout the pandemic, especially service and care industries, women of colour are the primary workers. Many of these fields do not offer adequate pay or strong workers’ protections. The jobs that belong largely to working-class women of colour, these feminized and racialized jobs, are the most undervalued. They leave their workers more likely to suffer from the virus and its aftermath. Workers exist in a gendered, racialized, and classed workforce. It’s through these identity-markers that the pandemic experiences of many women of colour are being determined and that their capacities to cope with the pandemic are dealt to them.

The statistics don’t exist in a vacuum. They are products of a patriarchal capitalist system where women are expected to bear the burdens of increased and unpaid labour both in the workplace and at home. Let’s not forget- the women that aren’t being overworked at their jobs are facing unemployment at home and all the pressures that come with it. Reproductive labour, the labour that many unemployed women have been thrown into full-force as a result of staying home now, is seen as an extension of womanhood. It’s viewed as natural for women to take up the cooking, cleaning and childrearing as they quarantine. Their time to destress becomes engulfed in their duties to the household, all of which is unpaid.

For women of colour, many of whom come from working-class backgrounds, reproductive labour becomes a reflection of a classist society. Working-class women of colour don’t just lack money- they lack time. Time for taking on extra shifts at work, time to rest, time to job-search, time to comprehend the vast chaos that is a severely mismanaged pandemic. They have no time because they are women of colour who are pulled into a racially segregated workforce to survive. This should be the prime time for childcare programs to offer services that help out families struggling to care for their children. But a consistent and often neglected issue, especially in Ontario, is the severe inaccessibility of these services. Despite being the ones who need services such as childcare the most, they are the ones with the least access to it.

As women of colour are forced to live through this pandemic with these highly politicized identities, it’s time for Canada and all our communities within to invest in these women. Accessible (and socially distanced) childcare is a great start. For women who are unemployed or continue to struggle to financially support themselves and their families, there must also be a continuation of stimulus checks. For women who continue to participate in the workforce, it’s essential that they’re paid in a way that reflects their contributions to our society and that their workplaces take appropriate measures to ensure their safety- after all, it’s women of colour who have had some of the higher rates of COVID contraction in the country. We must also continuously invest in mutual aid and women’s organizations and shelters to ensure our communities are a safe, supportive space for women of colour. Until our governments support and value women of colour’s work, we can support them using these community-based initiatives. There is much work to be done to help women of colour as the traditional economic order fails them, but these steps are necessary for greater change.