The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way we work. It has created job loss, work instability, financial hardship and great insecurity. It is generating deep problems for much of the working population in the UK, but it also impacts in starkly different ways on different groups of worker. This project is comparing how the pandemic is impacting the working lives of women and men. In collaboration with the UK Women’s Budget Group, it is examining how the workplaces of women and men, and the very experience of work, have been impacted as the pandemic effects rolled out in 2020 and into 2021.
The research asks whether the pandemic is narrowing or reinforcing existing gender inequalities in our ways of working. Has it created new inequities? To answer these crucial questions, the project is analysing data gathered from very many workers, and very different workplaces, across the whole of the UK.
This research will allow us to: • Track key labour force changes as the effects of the pandemic rolled out • Identify variation in the impact of COVID-19 on workplaces • Track over time workers’ worries about pandemic-induced changes to their employment situation.
The project will rapidly fill an urgent need. It will start to disseminate early findings and urgent policy solutions.
This research is part of the Data and Connectivity National Core Study, led by Health Data Research UK in partnership with the Office for National Statistics and funded by UK Research and Innovation (grant ref MC_PC_20029)