Thread by @snolen

Hey friends – a series I've been working on for the past year launched this week, if you have some time to spend with it, would be swell ... /1
thestar.com/whatcovidrevea…

As the @atkinsoncf Fellow in Public Policy, I've been tracking the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on people in Canada who were vulnerable, or made vulnerable, to the virus – and what we decide to do with what the pandemic showed us ... /2

The first piece in the series looks at why the economic crisis created by the pandemic had such an outsize impact on working women ... 3/ thestar.com/news/atkinsons…

A lot of women whose economic fortunes – and whole personal identity - were upended by COVID spoke to me for this series over the past year, and I tell the first story through the fortunes of the women who run a chain of beauty salons in Ontario, including @PaolaGirotti .../4

While Paola was struggling to save everything she built over decades – and watching male-dominated industries such as construction that get bailouts that never came for the beauty sector – her employee Gayani Senanayake had a different set of worries ... /6

Gayani had rent to pay, student loans to pay, her daughter's tuition to pay, family in Sri Lanka to keep fed, and she didn't qualify for EI or CERB through the first lockdown ... 7/

Women's workforce participation in Canada has been set back to the level of the early 1980s by COVID. The series asks, what would have kept women employed? And has government done enough to get women back to work? And make sure next time is different? ... 8/

You can read Paola and Gayani's story, and that of many more women in all different kinds of work, in part 1 of the series here thestar.com/news/atkinsons…

The second story in the series looks at what the crisis of carework created by the pandemic did to women's workforce participation thestar.com/news/atkinsons…

When schools closed and daycares closed and elders needed to be taken out of nursing homes – but so many people needed to keep somehow working – we all suddenly learned how much ideas about gender + caregiving have evolved (spoiler: NOT SO MUCH) thestar.com/news/atkinsons…

12 times more women than men left the workforce because of caregiving responsibilities. When the economy reopened but schools didn't – it was overwhelmingly women who carried that burden, either by leaving their jobs or somehow trying to "do both" thestar.com/news/atkinsons…

Once again, a lot of really generous women including @writtenbyamy and @RebeccaTee let me eavesdrop on their lives over the year as they tried to figure out how to do their jobs and also somehow teach third grade and keep everyone fed and sane .../13 thestar.com/news/atkinsons…

Did you try to Zoom with an important client while also building the solar system out of macaroni, some time in the past 16 months? Or did you decide to just give up on one or the other of those things? You will perhaps see yourself in this story ... /14 thestar.com/news/atkinsons…

Two moments that really stood out reporting this piece: first, when @tammyschirle told me, re hetero couples deciding woman be one to stay home with kids – "what is in the household interest is not necessarily in an individual woman's interest" ... /15 thestar.com/news/atkinsons…

... 2nd, when @JenniferRobson8 observed that even as there was a Canada Emergency everything - for rent, wages, income – there was no emergency plan for this, what may have been the single biggest faultline of the pandemic. "there was just, Figure it out for yourself" .../16

Eventually the feds created a COVID-related emergency caregiver benefit, a milestone bc it's 1st time government acknowledged carework has a cost. Did it help most working mums with this impossible 16 mos. of school open-closed-open-closed again? No .../17 thestar.com/news/atkinsons…

As economist @JimboStanford put it to me, Caregiving demands in the pandemic "chased the parenting-age women right out of the labour market. The gap was already bad and it got a lot worse.” ... /18 thestar.com/news/atkinsons…

Here's the irony of the pandemic-created caregiving crisis. It spurred the creation of something that governments have been promising for 3 decades: a national childcare plan! $30bn over 5 yrs to make childcare affordable and accessible across Canada.../19 thestar.com/news/atkinsons…

... but that plan did nothing for women struggling with the problem this past year – and as always, low-wage and racialized women bore the heaviest burden. If god forbid schools and daycares can't operate normally in the fall, the impact on women will grow thestar.com/news/atkinsons…