Gender and employment: Recalibrating women's position in work, organizations, and society in times of COVID‐19

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of women in the labor market and the unrecognized value of essential occupations such as care and education In many countries across the world, people applauded care workers from their balconies in the spring of 2020 (Wikipedia, 2022), in essence clapping for the many women employed in the strongly feminized care sector. Similarly, workers in the strongly feminized educational sector have shown resilience in providing school-age children with opportunities to continue education during COVID-19-induced lockdowns. At the same time, the pandemic highlights the continued undervaluation of women's work-both paid and unpaid-and appears to enhance the precarious nature of women's employment, in some cases causing women to lose their jobs at a rate faster than men (ILO, 2021). Indeed, the disproportionate effect of the early pandemic on women's employment (and mothers' employment in particular) has been well-documented in