Facing a pandemic ‘she-cession’ – SFU experts provide insight

The COVID-19 pandemic is having a disproportionate impact on women, according to a recent report from RBC.

Many who left the workforce to care for their children or have lost their job have not re-entered the workforce. 

The holiday season also has the potential to create more unpaid care work for women, leading to increased stress and poor mental health.  

SFU experts are available to discuss the pandemic’s impacts on women, how it is creating a ‘she-cession,’ and how we can mitigate these effects and build back better going forward. 

AVAILABLE SFU EXPERTS

KENDRA STRAUSS, associate professor and director, Labour Studies,   
kendra_strauss@sfu.ca      

• How the gendered impacts of the pandemic reflect the underlying gendered inequities across the spheres of paid and unpaid work that predated the pandemic
• How gender intersects with racialization in ways that particularly impact racialized women 
• The need for taxes on wealth and excess earnings (corporate and labour) to be invested in comprehensive public childcare and the expansion of public and not-for-profit services in sectors like seniors’ care   

JULIA SMITH, university research associate, Gender and COVID-19 Project, Faculty of Health Sciences  
604.837.4285 | jhs6@sfu.ca

• How the gender pay gap and gender norms contribute to women giving up paid work to provide unpaid care work, and how this will impact long-term career and personal development opportunities for women
• Impacts of rising COVID-19 cases on frontline workers, the majority of whom are women, related to the double stress of working in positions that put them at risk while trying to manage increased care burdens, and the long-term impacts of this stress
• How the holidays often create additional unpaid care work for women in addition to COVID-related burdens and uncertainty, and how this might exacerbate poor mental health 
  

AMANDA WATSON, lecturer, Department of Sociology and Anthropology 
778.956.7784 |adwatson@sfu.ca 

• Distributions of unpaid care/labour in families 
• How women disproportionately fill gaps in paid and unpaid labour in response to economic and family needs
• Why we should care about women leaving the labour force 

CONTACT 

MELISSA SHAW, SFU  Communications & Marketing 
236.880.3297 | melissa_shaw@sfu.ca

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