Covid-19 has only exacerbated these existing structural inequities. Of the 31,000 job losses due to the pandemic from March to September last year, 22,000 of those belonged to women, or 71 per cent. Claire Dale, with Auckland University associate professor Dr Susan St John, wrote a paper examining how the economic burdens of Covid-19 fall disproportionately on women, making the gender pension gap worse. "Women's employment in hospitality, childcare, cleaning of places like universities and schools that were all closed, work that can't be done remotely - it's primarily done by women. At the same time, closure of childcare facilities made a lot of women unable to work. And then the thing that was particularly irritating was that the [150 government-funded] shovel-ready projects were geared entirely to male employment," Dale says.
Naomi Arnold, 'Bad then, worse now: How Covid-19 will hurt retired women', RNZ