Around the Halls: The State of Human Capital Development After Two Years of COVID-19
March 11, 2022 marks two years since the World Health Organization officially declared COVID-19 a global pandemic. While the past two years have seen remarkable innovations in response to the pandemic’s disruptions, including new technologies and novel vaccines, the virus has also presented challenges for human capital development. In early 2021, Human Capital Initiative (HCI) experts shared top policy priorities for public health, gender and education as countries mounted their pandemic recoveries. One year later, the HCI team reflects on the current state of global health and gender inequality and offers predictions for the future.
Women’s Labor Market Outcomes
The pandemic-induced economic recession was named the “she-cession” because it disproportionately affected women. First, women are more likely to work in sectors that were most affected by lockdowns, such as hospitality and retail. Second, women’s participation in the labor market took a hit due to disruptions to schools and childcare centers.
Now that the world is lifting restrictions and moving towards a new normal, how does women’s labor market participation compare to pre-pandemic times? Analysis of 2022 data from the US Current Population Survey shows that for most demographic and education groups, labor force participation has bounced back to pre-pandemic levels. But one particularly vulnerable group still lags: women of color with children who work low-skilled jobs. Their labor force participation, already low compared to other groups, is still three percentage points lower than it was before the pandemic.
Women in this group are less able to cope with school disruptions. Recent data from the Census Household Pulse Survey shows that when schools and daycares closed during the pandemic, lower-income parents were more likely to resort to unpaid leave or quit jobs altogether. Their jobs offer fewer protections and are less likely to have a work-from-home option.
If there is a silver lining to the pandemic, it has put reliable and affordable childcare at the forefront of policy needs, at least in the US. Hopefully, changes will come, making female labor force participation more resilient to shocks.
Maternal and Child Health
The COVID-19 pandemic has imposed a tremendous strain on health systems globally, particularly in low- and middle-income countries where resources and healthcare personnel are limited. As countries continue to implement pandemic response strategies, routine and essential health services will continue to be disrupted, putting the lives of vulnerable women and children at risk.
There have been significant reductions and stagnations in the provision of maternal and child health services over the last two years. Estimates from India highlight a sharp decline in maternal health care utilization since March 2020, particularly for institutional deliveries and care-seeking for routine antenatal check-ups. Strikingly, immunization rates for children under the age of one fell by almost 30 percent for a range of vaccines. Findings from a study of eight countries in Sub-Saharan Africa present equally alarming trends, with outpatient department consultations falling by as much as 30 percent, child vaccination rates falling by as much as 17 percent and family planning consultations falling by as much as 17 percent.
The pandemic has and will only continue to create more barriers to access and healthcare-seeking, particularly in contexts where health systems are already at capacity. If the delivery of routine maternal and child health services is further disrupted or halted altogether, women and children will suffer. The longer the coverage gaps persist, the more lives will be lost, even after the pandemic ends.
Women’s Economic and Political Rights
Inequality skyrocketed in the first two years of the pandemic. Global billionaire wealth grew by more than 50 percent from 2019-2021 as 100 million people were simultaneously forced into extreme poverty. In the pandemic’s first year, the time required to close the gender equality gap also grew by a generation, driven by a stark increase in political gender inequality. At the current rate, it will take nearly 150 years to reach gender equality in politics.
Gendered political losses have severe economic repercussions. In my recent book on the impact of electoral quotas mandating the local political representation of women in India, I find that where women achieve representation as local government heads, female citizens are more likely to gain fundamental economic resources and property rights. Political representation is crucial to advancing women’s bargaining power within families and creating a foundation for economic autonomy and political participation.
Additionally, the gender gap in political participation that typically disadvantages women reverses when women have secure access to wealth. Thus, as women lost 64 million jobs in just the first year of the pandemic, totaling $800 billion in earnings, severe barriers to women’s political participation should be expected to rise.
As of March 2022, United Nations Development Programme and UN Women data shows women comprise just 24 percent of COVID-19 task force members. The increasing gender gap in women’s political voice is deeply consequential for global resilience. Women’s distinctive commitment to infrastructure for advancing the welfare of the most vulnerable groups, driven by contemporary sex/gender systems of power, means women’s political inclusion is vital to pandemic recovery.
Public Health
In two years, there have been 6 million deaths due to COVID-19 worldwide. Due to significant under-reporting, the true number could be over 20 million.
Early in the pandemic, it became apparent that the economically vulnerable were more likely to be exposed to infection due to inability to physically distance at work, and to morbidity and mortality due to higher prevalence of simultaneous medical conditions. These relative disparities were compounded by differential access to and uptake of vaccinations.
Across wealthy countries, those with stronger social safety nets (Europe) and a recent history of respiratory epidemics (Asia) fared better than the United States. Mortality in the US – particularly among non-elderly adults – has diverged from other wealthy countries for four decades, and this pattern continued during COVID-19. Despite a faster initial vaccine rollout, the US lags other wealthy nations in vaccine coverage and has had much higher mortality during the Delta and Omicron waves. Economic supports were implemented early in the pandemic, which reduced poverty, food insecurity and risk of exposure to COVID-19. Yet, those supports have largely been abandoned. Meanwhile, with little capacity for large-scale publicly-financed relief, just 5.5 percent of people in low-income countries have been fully vaccinated.
Gaps in global vaccination coverage prolong the pandemic. US President Joe Biden has asked Congress to allocate $5 billion for global vaccination efforts. Activists estimate that upwards of $17 billion would be required to meet the World Health Organization (WHO) target of vaccinating 70 percent of the world by September 2022. During the Omicron wave, unvaccinated people were 52.3 times more likely to die than people who were fully vaccinated with a booster shot. Scaling up vaccines will not only protect countries from the worst impacts of COVID-19, it will also reduce the likelihood that dangerous new variants will arise, upending public health and economies everywhere. While different countries inevitably mount different responses to COVID-19, the actions of each have implications for all.
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