The second wave of Covid-19 has worsened ‘shecession’ or ‘she-recession’ as double the working women in India are anxious about the availability of jobs, time for job-seeking as compared to working men, according to the LinkedIn Workforce Confidence Index report released on Tuesday.
Shecession is an economic downturn where women are affected more than men in terms of job loss and income loss. This term was coined by C. Nicole Mason, president and chief executive of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR), a think tank.
The LinkedIn survey recorded the responses of 1891 people from May 8 to June 4. The pandemic’s second wave has left, in particular Gen Z and working women extremely vulnerable to the economic uncertainty in today’s times of market uncertainty.
“The plight of India’s working women has worsened after the second COVID-19 wave, as the individual confidence index (ICI) scores of female professionals fell from +57 in March to +49 in early June ー a 4x decline compared to working men (+58 in March to +56 in June),” LinkedIn’s Workforce Confidence Index said.
“Decoding India’s evident ‘shecession’, findings show that India’s working women are ~2x more likely to be worried about the availability of jobs, their professional network, and time devoted to job seeking, than working men today. This uneven impact has also bruised the financial stability of working women as 1 in 4 (23%) female professionals are concerned about growing expenses or debt, in contrast with just 1 in 10 (13%) working men,” it added.
This loss in confidence of professionals can be seen across fields, ranging from creative industries such as entertainment, design, to media and communications, who are uncertain about their employees’ future.
“But as several parts of the economy gradually reopen, professionals from software andIT and hardware and networking are growing increasingly confident about the future of their organisations,” the survey said.
As per LinkedIn Labour Market Update, LinkedIn platform data suggests that the average time that a new graduate takes to find a new job is also increased by 43 per cent in 2020 when compared to pre-COVID-19 times in 2019.
“But while the conversion time has increased, so have remote opportunities, as LinkedIn platform data further suggests that the proportion of entry-level jobs labelled as’ remote posted between Jan-March 2020 have increased by 9x between 2020 and 2021,” it said.
“As India slowly begins to come out of the second wave of Covid-19 cases, we see the year-over-year hiring rate recover from a low of 10% in April to 35% at the end of May. Despite this modest revival, confidence levels of working women and young professionals are amongst the lowest in the workforce today,” Ashutosh Gupta, LinkedIn’s India Country Manager, said.
“Remote jobs can be the ray of hope, to provide the much-needed flexibility and growth in opportunities to help them bounce back into the workforce,” Gupta said.