Jennifer O’Connell: Even in a pandemic, it’s still a man’s world

A thousand years ago in May, when I was writing about why I believed it was important for schools to reopen before the summer holidays, I heard from a lot of parents – mothers, mostly. I’d written that the arguments in favour of allowing children briefly back into the classroom were about child welfare, not childcare. Still, parents had an intractable problem: what were they supposed to do between then and September?

In the event, they muddled through, as they always have to do in this country. Somehow, they managed to hold on to their jobs, educate their children, care for cocooning relatives, pay the bills, keep things ticking over at home. But we don’t know at what cost.

It's still disquieting to tot up all the ways in which even a world changed beyond recognition by coronavirus is stacked against women

Several of the letters I got were from women at senior positions in the kind of companies everyone is supposed to want to work at. One noted how her male colleagues get applauded when they “bring” their young children to Zoom meetings, but she would never have dreamed of doing it herself. She knew, as we all do, that women who have childcare problems that interfere occasionally with work are seen as “disorganised”, “unreliable” or “not really committed”, while men are seen as “brilliant dads” and maybe even “saints”.

Others described the all-too familiar feeling that they weren't giving 100 per cent to any of it, or they talked about having to temporarily "lean out" of their jobs a bit. Nine months on, how many of them have really been able to lean back in? "We know maternity leave is quite damaging" to women's career prospects, Alan Barrett, chief executive of the Economic and Social Research Institute, told me recently. One of the outstanding questions from this year is whether the effect on "this block of women looking after the kids from March to September, was that like another maternity leave" in terms of its potential to derail their career.

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We knew this was a man’s world, and there was no reason to think any of that would be different in a pandemic. Yet it’s still disquieting to tot up all the ways in which even a world changed beyond recognition by coronavirus is stacked against women.

For me, what will linger after this accursed year is over is not the grim daily log of case numbers and hospital and ICU admissions. It’s not the eye-watering Government borrowings, or the yo-yoing unemployment figures. It’s not the trials of coronavirus arithmetic – if six people from three households want to travel 8km across a county border to have a coffee at an outside cafe terrace, is that permitted? (The answer, in almost every case: just stay home.)

Instead, it’s the human stories of the people I met this year – many of them stories of women who have been disproportionately impacted by the pandemic. The women who were victims of domestic violence, for example. I spoke to one woman, whose story I will never forget, who described having to flee her home in America, seven months pregnant with a toddler on her lap, to get away from the husband she was afraid would eventually kill her, with nothing except a nappy bag and a bottle of Rescue Remedy thrust into her hand at the airport by a kind neighbour.

Or the women who were over-represented in the worst-hit industries from an economic point of view – retail, hospitality, personal care services – who talked about the trauma of seeing the salon or cafe they had poured their heart into shut down without warning, reopened, shut down again. Or the women working in frontline nursing jobs, like the ICU nurse I met in the Mater who asked politely if she could sit down for the interview because, six weeks after her recovery from Covid, she was still having trouble standing and talking at the same time. This year we learned about the student nurses, responsible enough to be charged with comforting the dying and bereaved, not responsible enough to get paid.

And then there were the women who told me stories of going through a pregnancy during the pandemic, and not being able to have their partners with them for so much of it. Ciara Clancy, from Cork, who had her first baby by C-section in April, described how her partner got to see his new son for one hour during the first four days of the baby's life. She talked about the aftershock on all of them. "You're at your most vulnerable as a new mother, as a first-time mother. I don't want to sound dramatic, but I think a lot of women will suffer PTSD for what they've gone through."

'It's kind of mad that she's the first member of Cabinet to give birth while in office; it's even madder that there isn't any provision for maternity leave,' said Cairns, speaking for every woman. Mad and madder.

None of this was deliberate, but it’s all systemic. None of it exclusively affects women either, but it affects women more. The harsh reality is that without more women in decision-making roles and positions of authority, women’s needs will never rank highly in a crisis – or at any time.

Why do we have such trouble attracting women into those roles? Let's ask Minister for Justice Helen McEntee, due her first baby next year, who currently has no entitlement to maternity leave, why she thinks that might be. Or ask Holly Cairns TD, who stepped up to volunteer to pair with McEntee if the maternity leave issue can't be solved, temporarily solving a problem male politicians have been dithering over for 40 years.

“It’s kind of mad that she’s the first member of Cabinet to give birth while in office; it’s even madder that there isn’t any provision for maternity leave,” said Cairns, speaking for every woman. Mad and madder.

Of all the grim lessons 2020 taught us, this is the only one that can’t have surprised anyone. This is still, as it has always been, a man’s world.