Dr Asiya Islam: “COVID-19 is not creating inequalities: it is exposing them.”
“Everything is going to be even more competitive so I fear that women will have to work harder, and women of colour will have to work even harder to get those same positions that white men might be able to get more easily.”
Dr Asiya Islam is a Junior Research Fellow at Newnham College, Cambridge. Before joining Cambridge, Asiya worked as Equality and Diversity Policy Adviser at the London School of Economics. She simultaneously was writing on gender and race issued as a freelance journalist published in the Guardian, New Statesman and Open Democracy.
Dr Islam’s research explores gender, class and labour in urban India. She particularly looks at lower middle-class women working in the service economy of New Delhi in the context of contemporary socio-economic change in India. Asiya’s recent article, “Two hours extra for working from home” Reporting on gender, space, and time from the Covid‐field of Delhi, India’, explores the case study of Prachi, a young woman working for an e-commerce company, who experiences the gendered implications of working from home during the Covid-19 pandemic. In the next instalment of our interview series, Dr Islam talks to Junior Editor Olivia Young about her career path into academia, the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on existing inequalities and whether there are reasons to be hopeful for ‘building back better’ after lockdown.
To begin, could you tell us more about how and why your career path has led into academia? You have an array of experience in areas such as freelance journalism and policy work in LSE, what drew you to political sociology?
I think there is a common thread running throughout the different professions that I have pursued as part of my career. I did policy work at LSE on equality and diversity while I was also doing freelance journalism on the side where I was writing mostly about race and gender issues. In that sense, I did not see them as separate things as my policy work was well matched with the theme of the articles that I was writing at the time. But the more I did that work, the more I realised that what drew me to it was my interest in understanding inequalities and that is actually what led me into the career in academia.
After a while with policy work and journalism, I realised that they were both modes of work in which you have to act fast, but also slowly at the same time. In policy work, even if the initiatives that you are taking can be quick, it often takes a long time to change things. With freelance journalism, you are rapidly writing articles and there is the ability for some analysis, but it is limited. So, because I was really interested in understanding more about inequalities and ways of addressing them, I felt like academia would be a good place for me to go because it really allows you time and space to do in-depth analysis in a way that other another profession would not . I did not go straight to academia after my Master’s degree, I do think that it was a good way to gain experience in other ways of thinking, in order to understand inequalities and ways of mitigating them. Eventually, the pace and process of academia convinced me that it was the right choice.
In this article you take a critical approach to literature written before the pandemic that thought flexible working would increase women’s career prospects. Do you think that those articles were misguided? Is it working from home in general as a concept or working from home in the context of COVID (with home-schooling and family members being home) that is intensifying gender inequalities?
There have been articles before the pandemic and still incoming that suggest that working from home is the future of work. I am not necessarily contesting that working from home could potentially be a good thing, I think I am just really trying to nuance the discussion. Obviously, there are several strands to these discussions and many linked with some of my previous equality and diversity work.
Most gender equality talk in the UK is focused on how to retain women workers through policies like working from home and flexible working to stop this leaky pipeline. In circumstances before the pandemic, we saw that women were the ones who were disproportionately taking up offers of flexible working even though they were offered to all employees. The simple explanation for that is that women disproportionately conduct unpaid housework, childcare, etc, and therefore need more time to adjust and fulfil all of those commitments. So, there is a sort of inequality within that. The problem here is that there is also evidence that even though these policies were supposed to retain women in the workplace, they often end up penalising them as well by slowing down their career trajectory. So, there is a lot of evidence that already problematises the notion that flexible working is necessarily good for women. It might be good for retaining them in employment, but it is not good in every way.
With the pandemic, so many people have been compelled to work from home, including men and women in different kinds of professions. In a way this could be a good thing because it is normalising it to the wider workforce and employers are adjusting to it in thinking about how to trust employees to be able to do the work, even though they are not in the space of the office. That has led to these discussions about the possible future of work where we could see working from home or a mix of working from home and office spaces.
But what you also find is that these discussions are quite limited in that they mostly talk about the global North and specific kinds of professions. Also, when it comes to women they are mostly talking about mothers, particularly middle-class mothers, so there is a focus on childcare and how that interacts with flexible working. Through my work, I am trying to expand and nuance this discussion to think beyond the global North and beyond mothering when we talk about what it means for women to work from home. In my article, I identify infrastructure as a category to help us think about what it means to work from home. By infrastructure I do not just mean physical infrastructure such as laptops, but also social infrastructure of rest and care, which we know that women do not often get equally to men.
As you stipulate in the article, for around 50% of workers, primarily in low paid jobs like supermarkets and care staff which are primarily occupied by women, working from home was not possible during the pandemic. Do you think this could lead to a shift in public perception of the value of these lower-paid jobs and thus greater appreciation and respect for their majority female employees?
I think it is a good question as I do not necessarily see that happening. So, in the UK we have been clapping for NHS workers and have this narrative of medical staff as heroes in this pandemic, but this is in contention with issues with their pay and pensions. Also, we have not really seen a similar recognition for workers who do other kinds of essential work like cleaning or supermarket staff who are all low paid workers and they are disproportionately women, but they are also disproportionately people of colour and migrants. So, there is a real opportunity for an analysis of intersectional inequalities in these kinds of jobs.
Of course, the pandemic has really made us think about what counts as essential work. But the next step and following question from that ought to be, if this is essential work, how do we value it? Or, in other words, if this is essential work, why is it undervalued? It has not come yet, but we may potentially be on the path to it just by thinking about what counts as essential work.
Looking at Prachi, the woman in your article, who is working in e-commerce, she suggests that her employers are using the pandemic as an excuse to cut pay, have more surveillance over their employees and longer working hours from home. But, in the UK, there were a lot of companies who, in sacrifice of their own profits, increased pay and staff benefits for key workers that carried on working during the pandemic. Why do you think that disparity has occurred? Do you think it could be rooted in the perceived value of jobs that produce results in the public eye versus someone working on a computer, almost doing their work behind the scenes?
It is a complex comparison between UK and India where the UK is a welfare state. For example, in the UK workers were being put on furlough, whereas in India there is a very different context. When the lockdown first started in India last year there was the migrant workers crisis. What happened was that the Prime Minister announced a very strict lockdown with only a four-hour notice and that was done deliberately so people did not move around. But this did not account for the large numbers of Indians who leave rural areas in search of work opportunities to find work, commonly low-paid and manual, in urban areas. When the lockdown was announced, all of those jobs stopped so they did not have any way to earn an income. They naturally wanted to go back home, to be with their families and be in their villages again and several people lost their lives in that crisis. The government did eventually announce some benefits for workers who had lost employment during the lockdown, but benefits were minimal, for example, around 500 rupees (approx. £5) each month for women so it did not really amount to anything.
Since Prachi worked in a private sector job there was no government involvement in that whatsoever and the government actively wanted to be excluded from it. So, we can see this withdrawal of the state from the responsibility that it should be taking. But we do have to see that Prachi is still one of the privileged workers since she did not lose employment during the lockdown. She was the only one in her family who was still earning money and that was the money keeping them going. Whereas migrant workers and many other workers did lose their jobs and were not paid for the months that there was a very strict lockdown in India. So, it is quite complicated to compare these contexts and it invites us to think about the ways work is organised in these countries and the role that the state plays in that.
We can see through the experience of Prachi that it is the lack of physical and social infrastructure that are impairing working lives considerably, particularly for women. What do you think can be done in the short term or what should have been done before to combat this?
Yeah, I think it is a really difficult one, right? With the physical and social infrastructure, we are talking about women's interaction with both their employers and their families. These are two separate sites, but, of course when you are working from home, they get converged in the space of the home. Looking at Prachi, her employer provided her a laptop for work which was useful in the sense that she would not have been able to work without it so it was obviously in the employer’s interest to provide equipment. What is more difficult is managing expectations within the family. Her family did not completely understand why she was sitting in a room, working at her laptop because that is not the kind of work that her parents had done. But there was also the unequal treatment on the basis of gender. She spoke at length about how if her brother was working from home, she knows that he would be given all the space and quiet and peace of mind to do his work, which Prachi was not given.
On the employer’s side, if you are expecting employees to work from home there needs to be more thought around building trust and enhancing workers capacities. In the long term, that is what will benefit them rather than the experiences of hyper surveillance that Prachi talks about. Whereas within families, it is going to be a much longer adjustment. In many ways, her just working in the space of the home did familiarise Prachi’s family with working from home. Also, in terms of social infrastructure there was some negotiation and we saw her asserting her space and time more, but I think it was relatively small amounts of movement and it would take much longer for significant change.
Do you think this could lead to a deterioration of employees’ physical and mental health since they may feel less able to call in sick from work as they're already at home, and could this have impacts on their health in the long-term?
Prachi did talk a bit about this, not in terms of her own illness, but in relation to her mother's. For some time, her mother was quite ill and that created a real split for Prachi. She did not feel like she could say to her employer that she needed to take time off work to look after her mother because she was already at home. Equally though she could not say to her family that she could not be involved in caring for her mother because she was going to work. So, she found this kind of midway situation, difficult for her where she was trying to work to full capacity while also contributing to looking after her mother. As you suggest, I think that can lead to employees not being healthy but still working because they are at home. This then shows the dangerous side of working from home in the sense that it is a space that is removed from your workplace, but it is still your workplace. This blurring of boundaries has been talked about, but more in terms of women's mothering responsibilities and less about how illness could impact that. I think that can be a potentially problematic area in that sense.
Looking to the return to work after COVID-19, do you think that a staggering of the return to the workplace could create more problems for women? Prachi discusses how she missed three days of work and felt like work had progressed without her and she felt outstepped since she has been less involved in decision-making, so the people who are last to return might be at a disadvantage. Do you think there is reason to believe that it might be men that are more likely to go back first than women and what the impact of that will be?
I think this will be really interesting to see. I wonder if men who were working from home for the first time during this pandemic have now seen the benefits and would like to continue flexible working. But my inclination would be to say that that is not going to be the case just based on previous trends in men's employment and their take up of things like parental leave and flexible working. I do think it is possible that we will see men disproportionately going back to work first and women continuing to work from home, creating this two-tier hierarchical situation where the people who are present in the office seem to be committed to work are mostly men, whereas women are left behind. One thing to also note is that we are talking about the pandemic, but the pandemic in itself does not create inequalities. In some ways it just really exposes inequalities, right? And in some cases, it exacerbates them. The situation that we are talking about could potentially exacerbate inequalities or it could just maintain previous levels of inequalities. But exposing these inequalities is probably a good thing in that we are finding ourselves thinking much more about them.
In general, do you think that COVID-19 might encourage a more equal distribution of domestic labour and childcare between men and women?
Maybe I am just a pessimist, but my inclination is to say no. There is some preliminary research, which is already suggesting that where everyone in a heteronormative family unit is working from home, women are still disproportionately doing housework and childcare, but are now also overburdened with things like home-schooling. So, it seems like it is more likely that women will just take on even more rather than it being a more equal distribution of domestic labour. If I was more hopeful, I would say that because working from home has been normalised, perhaps looking after children or doing housework would be normalised in the same way. But this conversation around equality in the realm of work is very different to the conversations around equality in the space of the home, where these patterns of the unequal distribution of domestic work are more enduring. Perhaps this is because domestic work is seen to be in the private sphere so is in a way invisible and is not as publicly discussed.
Whereas paid work in workplaces is seen to be in the public sphere so is under much more discussion and subject to far more conversation. There was a recent study which looked at the proportion of men and women submitting articles to academic journals. It said that the rate of women submitting articles had gone down, whereas the rate for men had gone up. So, it was not just a simple case of men and women submitting the usual amount, which could still be an unequal distribution. The gap has actually widened. It seems that with the dynamics of home-schooling and working from home in the lockdown, women were less likely to submit articles, whereas men seemed to have created a more amicable environment in which they could be more productive. That is a really interesting example to think through and it gives us some indications as to whether or not we can be hopeful about this situation.
Prachi talks extensively about the inequality in perception between her and her brother, but also her and male colleagues from the eyes of the employer. Do you think that can be mirrored in terms of male and female students with home-schooling? How will the different abilities of families that have to home-school children affect existing socio-economic, racial and gender inequality?
I think it is very problematic that one of the common refrains with this pandemic is that it has been a social leveller since everyone in the world is going through a pandemic. But of course, it is not. The discussion that we are having today is just a tiny discussion in the wider scope of inequalities that have been highlighted in the pandemic. This question relates to what we were discussing about how the pandemic can potentially expose or even exacerbate inequalities. So, with families where both parents are in low-paid jobs where they still have to go into work, or if they are working from home but there is no capacity for working flexibly, that will restrain them a lot in terms of home-schooling. We have seen some response to that, with the government saying that if you are an essential worker, your child can come into school. So, there has been some steps to mitigate that, but I would still think that there would be pressure for families that are already marginalised in terms of their income, race, gender, etc. to face all of these pressures and really exacerbate those inequalities.
In the UK, similar to how Prachi’s employers gave her a laptop, the government gave a lot of student’s laptops, but that does not mean they have the social infrastructure to work at home effectively.
Yes, physical infrastructure is just one part of it, isn’t it? It has been a similar situation in India where differences between middle class and working class families’ capacity to home school have been drastic. In a country like India, many children might have been the first ones in their families to go to school. How are their parents, who might have never gone to school, supposed to home-school effectively and get appropriate support to get through this period?
To round up, what advice would you give to young scholars who are considering a career in academia similar to your own or any of your previous experiences, particularly young women given the difficult terrain they may face after COVID-19?
With the pandemic, one of the things that is slightly worrying and not just slightly but is very worrying is that there are going to be fewer job opportunities in academia and in other spheres. So that implies that everything is going to be even more competitive so I fear that women will have to work harder, and women of colour will have to work even harder to get those same positions that white men might be able to get more easily. But at the end of the day, it is about what you want to do and what you are interested in. My career has been in different professions but throughout it has been focused in trying to understand and address inequalities. So, my suggestion to young women who are interested in a similar career would be to look around and think about different and new ways in which that can be done. There is always competition, but I would not want that to discourage anyone because there are always opportunities and new ways of doing things.
That is also the thing with the pandemic and how we are living through very extraordinary circumstances. I have a friend who talks about a Chinese proverb which says, 'we live through interesting times' and she says ‘I wish we were not living through interesting times’. That joke aside, we are living through very interesting times and for people who are interested in inequalities or might have had marginal interests in inequalities, they now might be seeing these different aspects and find themselves studying it much more closely. In a way this time provides us quite rich material for thinking through those questions we have about the world we are seeing around us.