Could Coronavirus set gender equality back decades? | BBC Stories

the past few months of our life have felt like no other and there has been so much noise and information out there toughest restrictions on our way of life in living memory to slow the spread of the disease bringing the total number of deaths to 41 481 when we first went into lockdown it felt like coverage was rightly focusing on death rates and social distancing but i remember at the time there was one hidden headline i found buried away that really made me sit up and take notice the un says that covert 19 could set women back decades on gender equality alongside the health emergency we're really seeing an epidemic of hidden harm against women and girls women so far seem to be taking a bigger pay hit than men what does that mean well we've already got a gender pay gap of about 18 for all workers so it could take you know literally decades to get back to where we were before this crisis over the past few weeks i've spoken to women on the phone over email and from a distance from all across the uk for the women i've chatted to isolation has caused new problems but for most it's just exacerbated the issues and inequalities that already existed in their lives hello

so it is week two of lockdown currently we are only allowed out of the house once a day for a little bit of exercise but for women like kate the home is a place to fear being trapped in a marriage you were just getting ready to leave after years of emotional abuse she hasn't really felt comfortable to talk to me on the phone because she's obviously at home with him but we've been emailing over the past few weeks kate said after she had her son things got pretty bad quickly and have continued to get worse and worse she said this has been an extremely hard decision to make and i'm so scared there are so many things to think about i want my son to know his dad but i need to know he's safe doing so what were your initial thoughts when lockdown was announced she said my heart sank i was so relieved when i found out he would still be working this allowed my son and i to have some quality time together when i found out that he was being furloughed i felt sick i rang my mum as i didn't know when i'd next be able to stop holding back the tears things i'm unsure what mood he'll start each day in i'm shattered worrying and wondering is draining i was emailing kate for months during lockdown one day she called me to say her partner was out for a last-minute job and she wanted to meet in the park to talk about leaving her marriage during a pandemic we've used an actress to protect her identity whenever i bring up about him being controlling i get different answers before it'd be like he'd have to know where we were going and then it got to the point where he didn't want to know anything he wouldn't ask us are his son anything about how his day had been but you know i just finally feel ready to get on with this new chapter for his birth i think my son will realise himself in time if i don't do anything about it now you know it's already getting worse and worse at home so i don't see it ever getting any better he can't flip a switch to all of a sudden become mr nice guy how aware do you think he is of how you feel and how he treats you well we had a massive argument on sunday in the end i just put tea on the table and ended up having to leave with our son he'd upset me that much that i just couldn't be there he just made me feel awful and like i just wasn't worthwhile don't want to stop arson from seeing his dad but when we leave i mean i don't think he'd hit him or anything but he's thrown stuff at me when i've been holding him you just don't know do you

we've seen that very little data actually has been collected on the impact of this crisis on disabled women because we were able to publish some analysis of the impact on disabled women have found that they were the ones reporting extremely high levels of anxiety much more likely to say they've lost support during this crisis hello hey jess how are you i'm okay how are you so prior to people knocked down measures um i was living in a mental health recovery house and i was under a lot of treatment teams that had been dissolved obviously under carotid virus and i was put into emergency council housing which i wasn't meant to live in until i had a carer until there were adaptations in place i've been speaking to jess for a few months after she had a coronavirus outbreak in the mental health recovery house she was living in the local council moved it into temporary accommodation and say that they've been actively trying to move her into a new premises during the pandemic as livable a space as possible i've pushed my table against the wall to try and make my wheelchair usable inside but at the end of the day it's just not suitable or adapted to my needs like the bathroom is too small to fit my correct shower chair in any issues that i flagged would dismiss and i think a lot of women obviously go through that as being sort of like almost gaslighted into me in a statement barnet council said in the event that accommodation is unsuitable the council works with this individual to address this through adaptations or securing alternative accommodation this is a little bit over-sharing and depressing but um i've had like a few instances of like overdoses in the last couple weeks and um haven't reached out for help for some of them being intentional but not with the intention of dying when i'm in a situation where a crisis like that is taking place i have sort of a limited window in which to safeguard myself and sedation becomes the only option in these situations yeah and innovation obviously takes the form of unfortunately overdoses the safety nets that would be in place have all gone and the risk levels have increased as well which yeah very allow me for the most marginalized women living in the most difficult circumstances being trapped in their homes being unable to reach out to those social networks in the usual way can mean and feel very different to others and it's really important that is recognized in the ongoing response to

coronavirus at the moment in lockdown one of the only things we can do is exercise and i've been seeing a lot of talk on instagram about coming out of this with a lockdown body around 1. 25 million people in the uk have an eating disorder 75 of them are women and it's made me wonder what this period of time is doing for women that struggle with body image and control hi hello nick humber here how are you hello all right thank you i have anorexia so it's obviously a completely restricting controlling yeah it's all around routine but obviously all that taken away which was all taken away at once you're left with nothing so i just took all the food away if i do eat anything it's only usually the corn cakes and because when it first happened everyone seemed too panicked flying so i went to the shop which usually you don't have trouble buying corn cases most people think it's like eating fresh air and they said every all the shelves everything i'm thinking people buying them and they're probably sat in their cupboards at home just in case yeah and there's people that survive on those foods helen's recovery program had to be paused during covert her therapist had been helping her relationship with food and exercise but over the lockdown helen's weight dropped even further i would say everyone is suffering in so many different ways and the world doesn't know about it the whole thought process to me it's like the volume of those voices have doubled and what kind of thoughts would you say it puts in your head so if i haven't done certain things in a day then it's just it's always repeating you haven't done it it's not good enough you don't deserve to have that later as in the food you haven't put in effort it's all about righteousness and not being good enough perfectionism sometimes i can't do this anymore

whilst also being more likely to die of coronavirus black and asian women have also reported worse financial and psychological consequences during this pandemic just under 50 percent of baame women compared to 34 of white women said that they'd lost support of another person or had felt socially isolated during this lockdown and for some bame mothers like imani they've had to make the ultimate sacrifice to carry on working on the front line during this pandemic yeah as a single mum um when i found out that we had to lock down i had to you know consider uh that i would have to continue cleaning and so i'd have to look down away from my daughter in order to keep up with my cleaning obligations you know wanting to see my daughter and talking to her on screen but not being able to touch her hug her and just keeping up the morale on screen you know and then i would come off screen and cry because i couldn't hold her or be with her so i think there's been a lot of talk lately about how people from ethnic minorities do a lot of the frontline low paid work do you think that moving forward that's something we need to recognize more in society yeah i do i think that it has taken something like this pandemic for it to be recognized they don't have the luxury of saying i'm gonna lock down and i'm just gonna you know forget about work and you know like myself it was just like okay as long as it's still okay for me to go to work and the government is not saying that i can't work i'm just going to keep working because i literally have to what all of this evidence shows is that we have an approach from government which has been gender blind they have not thought about the impact on women from the start of this crisis we need to use this crisis as an opportunity and we have to seize the moment to increase pay improve conditions and get all of us back into normality and to work and that means not leaving women and girls behind