Social Lives
Author: Pauline Cullen , Associate Professor Department of Sociology Maynooth University
“The majority of healthcare workers are women, and both paid and unpaid caring roles mostly fall to women as well. Then there is the additional challenge of increased pressure on the domestic front,” writes campaign group Covid Women’s Voices, a diverse range of female healthcare workers, teachers, academics, lawyers and others that observe daily the gendered realities of the pandemic. This group echoes calls from feminist organisations including the National Women’s Council that women’s voices are insufficiently heard during the pandemic.
The facts bear out their lived experience. Ireland ranks 101st in the world for women’s parliamentary representation. Successive and severe lockdowns have closed schools, childcare and supports for older people and those with disabilities for long periods of time placing significant burdens on women. Inconceivably, there are no women on Ireland’s governmental committees on Health and Covid-19.
Inequality in domestic care work and homeschooling is not just draining, but also leads to serious career inequality. Women comprise almost 80% of healthcare workers and six in 10 carers, and 70% of low paid essential workers. The Health Protection Surveillance Centre found 77 per cent of Covid-19 cases among healthcare workers are female. Yet the Irish Parliamentary Committee on Covid-19 rejected proposals from the National Women’s Council to have a specific focus on women’ s experience of the pandemic and in particular their role in care provision. Instead, crisis management has reflected deep-seated gendered assumptions about unpaid care work as an infinite elastic resource women provide to absorb care needs. The reality is that while care demands on women during the pandemic are constant and exhausting, there is no ethic of care informing or underpinning Ireland’s crisis response.
A poor and largely privatized care infrastructure is a product of cultural lag that situates women as primary carers. While the legacies of austerity and an increasing market led approach to services leaves the state ill-equipped to address the permanent care crisis. Children with special education needs, family carers, care workers and people with disabilities have all experienced increased disadvantage and social suffering due to the pandemic, yet remain peripheral to state action.
Rationalistic, masculinist, and behavioural scientific approaches that may engender thin and calculative forms of societal solidarity at best often drive pandemic crisis management. Strict lockdowns secured public compliance under the trope ‘we are in this together’. We might be all in this together but ‘we’ are not all experiencing it in the same way. Gendered, racialised, ablest and class based inequalities mean those who are at most risk of poverty and living in overcrowded and/or congregated settings are more likely to contract COVID -19. As an alternative to a rationalist approach to crisis, Branicki (2020) suggests a feminist crisis management embedded in a care ethic that acknowledges the reciprocal reality of care, relational needs and capacities. Embracing the ethical centrality of care is transformative, because it makes visible people and issues often marginalised and in turn can deliver social transformation.
Our feminist critique of pandemic crisis management in Ireland draws on empirical data analysing state and civil society crisis responses in care, income support and gender based violence. We interrogate the gendered assumptions underlining state action and conclude state crisis management remains indifferent to the unequal gendered effects of the pandemic. We find that civil society crisis responses are often experientially grounded and, in some cases, reflect complex intersectional realities of communities who live in permanent crisis. Our analysis suggests some traction of feminist knowledge in non-routine forms of state action and examples where feminist expertise can compel states to act. Deployment of additional public funds have enabled extraordinary forms of state and civil society crisis response that generated innovation and collaboration in relation to gender violence and homelessness.
Feminists and their allies also worked to frame care outside of marketized rationales and income support outside of a male breadwinner welfare system, to define childcare as an essential public service and underline the value of largely female “frontline workers”. Such calls were based in a broader call for a care economy including public services organised through a feminist ethics of care. This call resonates with Lynch’s (2020) argument for a political recognition of the interdependency of care and need for affective justice .
However, the state has resisted a shift to universal public childcare and despite poor pandemic outcomes in care homes maintains support for marketizing care services – all of which maintain a reliance on female dominated unpaid and low paid care work. What is required as Emejulu and Bassel (2019) suggest is a radical politics of care. To centre care in this way and connect it to de-commodified political economy and service provision also opens up the possibility for a more capacious notion of care. As Hakim, Litter and Rottenberg (2020) suggest the need for a promiscuous care that “ means caring more and multiplying who we care for and how, challenging underfunding and undermining, of care that has often led to paranoid and chauvinist caring imaginaries – looking after only ‘our own’.” A careful post pandemic policy could reconcile care obligations, individualize income and promote women’s economic independence while improving the status and value of care and choice and autonomy of those cared for.
[i] A version of this blog appears as Irish feminists need to mobilise for a post pandemic future built on an ethic of public care. By Pauline Cullen and Mary Murphy (Maynooth University) The Global Institute for Women’s Leadership King’s College London