Women of the Pandemic

by Lauren McKeon

  That’s largely because the crisis only heightened barriers women already face in the business world: a lack of access to capital, a bias against the sectors where they’re most represented, and unbalanced domestic responsibilities. In April, the Canadian Women’s Chamber of Commerce and the Dream Legacy Foundation teamed up to survey underrepresented founders and entrepreneurs about the impacts of the economic shutdown on their business, home life, and mental health. It defined underrepresented as “those outside the main entrepreneurship narrative”—i.e., anyone who wasn’t white, cisgender-male, or Canadian-born. The results are depressing. While data showed that only 22 per cent of small businesses in Canada expected a 10 to 20 per cent decrease in revenue at the time, a whopping 50 per cent of those surveyed reported the same. More than 60 per cent of women-owned businesses stated they had lost contracts, customers, or clients, compared to 34 per cent of all small businesses in Canada. More than half told of negative health impacts and roughly the same number said they’d taken on additional child care duties. When narrowed down to racialized respondents’ experiences, the already-dismal numbers worsened. A full 80 per cent of racialized founders of all genders reported lost contracts, customers, or clients. It’s perhaps no wonder that their mental health costs were similarly higher.

  One Indigenous woman in B.C. shared her experience: “I am home trying to balance work and family life. My sales have dropped significantly and I am facing delays in the shipping of my supplies and my product. I am limited to pursue my growth plans as they involved travel to the U.S. I have had to defer several bills due to no revenue coming in from sales.” A Black businessowner in Montreal wrote of not receiving refunds for cancelled events, adding that all of her funding applications had been unceremoniously cancelled. A facilitator in St. John’s chillingly noted that nobody was interested in training because they didn’t know if they would be around in a year. Others reported not being able to take meetings and important business calls because they were parenting their children. Many had lost revenue from long-term, almost-completed projects that were abruptly trashed. Event and conference revenue vanished. One woman in Whitehorse summed up the strange reverse feeling of sixty-to-zero: “Within one week, we lost every single booked contract we had for the foreseeable future. Our business effectively came to a halt in the middle of what was, to date, the busiest March of our career.”

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  A recession is, in its own way, a contagion. From closed shops and beleaguered companies, the disease spreads, triggering mass job loss, missed bills, evictions. The economic consequences of the COVID-19 lockdown cascaded through many industries that heavily employ women: hospitality, service, retail, recreation, arts and entertainment, but also, perhaps surprisingly, health care and social services—making it the first recession in Canadian history that is service-driven. All told, the pandemic plummeted women’s participation in the labour force to 55 per cent, its lowest point in three decades. In the first two months alone, 1.5 million women lost their jobs, sparking the term “she-cession.” Women in the core working ages, between twenty-five and fifty-four, lost more than twice the number of jobs lost by men in the same age range. But if women’s losses were unprecedented, so too was their ability to fix it. “On both sides—on both the carnage as well as the pick-up-the-pieces side—women are for the first time leading economic responses through public policies and through market actions,” Armine Yalnizyan, an economist and Atkinson Fellow on the Future of Workers, told CBC’s The Current in March. Meaning, women were driving the losses, but they were also, in many cases, driving the recovery.

  Women could be forgiven, however, if it felt like they only saw evidence of the carnage. Before CERB was announced on March 25, and before the program began accepting applications on April 6, tens of thousands of Canadians who had already lost their jobs overloaded the country’s antiquated EI system. On one early Monday in March, people filed 71,000 claims, punching through the previous single-day record of 38,000 set during the 2008 recession. They broke the record again just a few days later, filing 87,000 claims. By the end of March, the government had 2.2 million EI claims on its virtual desk. People waited for hours and, more often, days to get through to Service Canada’s information line. One man reported making 1,700 phone calls before he got through, while others enlisted friends’ and partners’ phones to call from multiple numbers at once. To help with the overload, and in anticipation that CERB would trigger an avalanche on Employment and Social Development Canada, the government quickly recruited 1,500 volunteers from within to work the phone lines. In the end, about 7,000 people raised their hands to step outside their regular jobs and help answer calls. And still call times stretched like Guinness World taffy. Many people reported calling dozens of times before getting through, only to gratefully make it to the next step: listening to elevator music for, very possibly, their entire day. Or, as one woman put it in mid-April, “Finally got put on hold for three hours…made two loaves of banana bread and at 4:35 p.m. they answered. I swear I cried.”

  By the end of September, at the program’s close, more than 8.8 million people had accessed CERB, totalling $80.62 billion in government relief. Many of them had stayed on CERB for months, holding tight to the lifeline. For plenty of women, and particularly mothers, the line frayed anyway—even if it didn’t snap. One twenty-seven-year-old single mother from Ontario who lost her job at the beginning of the pandemic shared that she was no longer able to afford medication for her rheumatoid arthritis. After taking care of rent, covering utilities, and paying for her baby’s needs, she had only $200 left every month to buy gas and food. She was forced to skip bills, and felt the pain settle in joints. “My baby has everything he needs and that’s what you got to do,” she said in May. “I’ll live on pasta as long as I have to.” Another mom, who lives in B.C. with her boyfriend and two children, said that, while CERB ensured the family’s survival, it was barely enough; under the program, and while keeping one of her jobs as a part-time server, she still brought in anywhere from $1,300 to $2,300 less each month. CERB didn’t quite cover her rent. Without her partner’s help, she would have been in a “scary situation”: unable to buy food or pay her bills. “Sadly,” she acknowledged, “I’m not the only one.”

  In many ways, CERB helped to normalize social assistance. In the process, it squashed—or, at the very least, stepped on—stigmas about who needed to access such programs, and why. People who once uttered, “I would never…” and “Only lazy people …” found themselves without jobs, without opportunities, and yet with plenty of bills and basic needs. More revolutionary, however, were all the renewed conversations about, and demands for, a universal basic income (UBI). The unforeseen and ultra-accelerated economic quake, and with it the introduction of CERB, underscored the precarity of many Canadians. People who’d never heard of a UBI, or had perhaps dismissed its need, were newly open to the conversation. Suddenly, a program under which everyone is guaranteed basic earnings didn’t seem so far-fetched. Advocates pushed for Trudeau to pledge its implementation in his September throne speech, and for a while it felt like he would. He didn’t (quite), but all the speculation only forced UBI more into the mainstream conversation, something that was, largely, previously unthinkable. “COVID brought us face to face with the fact that stuff happens that is beyond anybody’s control,” said Dana Wylie, who organized a basic-income rally in September in Edmonton. Before the virus, she hadn’t been involved at all in the issue; the pandemic changed her mind. “Yes, the government stepped up and helped but what that made me realize is that this happens to families all the time.”

  But, for all its positives, CERB wasn’t a panacea. The temporary relief could do little to address the flip side of the “she-cession”; that is, the need for a so-called “she-covery.” As the economy haltingly—and in some cases, seemingly rapidly—reopened, many women were left behind. They did not recover their jobs at the same rate as men, a
nd for multiple reasons. Fields that tend to employ more women, like the hospitality industry and administrative services companies, face significantly longer recovery periods, at eight and five years respectively. Compare that to construction or manufacturing, which, by fall 2020, were looking at significantly shorter recovery timelines of just over one year. And reduced child care services added another set of house-sized concrete hurdles to women’s back-to-work paths. As one woman said in May, “Do I find a job first? Do I find child care? How do I do one without the other?” Between February and May, employment among parents with toddlers or school-aged kids fell more for mothers than fathers, and more still for single mothers. One report found that, while women accounted for about 45 per cent of the decline in hours during the initial downturn, they would only make up 35 per cent of the recovery.

  At the same time, the economic infusion—for some—also prompted the government to discontinue CERB in October, precipitating plenty of panic, even as promises of a smooth transition back to an expanded EI program abounded. “I feel almost caged,” said one mother in Winnipeg who was still unable to return to work. “I’ve been put in some type of situation where I have to sit there and deal with whatever comes my way, and I have no control over it.” Many women were left wondering how they’d pay back any CERB payments they received in error—a not uncommon mistake made by the government in the rush to provide assistance. Others wondered how they’d later pay the required income taxes that came with CERB. Almost all wondered what they could possibly do next. Every day seemed to bring on a new anxiety, their grip on the lifeline feeling a little looser. To make matters worse, the end to eviction bans had a parallel timeline. Already in April, Ontario landlords, for example, had reported a 10 per cent delinquency rate, a tenfold increase from the usual 1 per cent. At that time, one tenants’ advocate predicted a “bloodbath” when the ban officially ended, and for many people that was now coming true. And around the same time, about 760,000 Canadians had deferred mortgage payments coming due. “It’s a limit that you thought you’d never have to hit,” said the Winnipeg mom, speaking of the resulting stress. “And then you hit it. And you have to hit it again the next day.” That’s to say nothing at all of the women who couldn’t access CERB—or any other form of government assistance—in the first place.

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  On paper, twenty-five-year-old Maryama Ahmed had done everything right. The political science major graduated from the University of Toronto in fall 2019, becoming the first person in her immediate family to earn a bachelor’s degree. Photos from that day show Ahmed cradling a bouquet of apricot roses, her gaze focused on something in the distance—possibly her future. And by all accounts, her future did look good. Over the next few months Ahmed applied for, and got accepted into, graduate school at Memorial University of Newfoundland to further her study in political science. In the meantime, she decided to get a full-time job to pay off her student loans, save for school, and support herself. In February 2020, she was hired for a front-desk position at a downtown Toronto hotel, not too far from her apartment. Her first day was in early March, and Ahmed was excited: her colleagues seemed great, the job paid well, and she had full-time benefits. She was also proud of herself. After growing up in a low-income household, and working a bevy of part-time and contract jobs throughout school, she had found security. A third feeling mixed in: safety. If the path to successful, stable adulthood came with a to-do list, she was checking off every box.

  But in the first week of her new job, warning signs already dotted the hotel. After some early scares, the hotel had put a quarantine process in place. Hand sanitizer stations decorated the lobby, halls, every floor. Ahmed remembered thinking that, outside of a hospital, she’d never seen so many installed in one place. The safety measures she’d learned in training had already changed—become more intense, more detailed, more extensive. Within a few days, employees had their hours slashed. “Honestly,” Ahmed told her fellow trainees, “we shouldn’t be surprised if we get laid off.” She just didn’t think it would happen so quickly. On March 18, an email from work detonated her inbox, announcing, “Unfortunately, we are shutting down operations.” The email listed a tentative reopening date, but Ahmed had a feeling the pandemic would follow an old adage. That is, things in the city would get significantly worse before they got better. She predicted the hotel wouldn’t reopen when it planned, and it didn’t. The date kept getting pushed back. Ahmed had bills and rent to pay, food to buy, thirty thousand dollars in student debt, and now no income. She watched every update from Prime Minister Trudeau, following every scrap of news, waiting for a relief program. “When the government announced CERB, I thought, ‘Oh wow,’ ” she said, “ ‘This is going to be for me. I lost my job because of COVID-19.’ ”

  Except, it wasn’t. To be eligible for CERB, an applicant had to have earned at least five thousand dollars in the previous twelve months. Ahmed hadn’t been at her job long enough to meet the threshold. She’d worked a bit over the summer, and had done some tutoring throughout the school year, but it all put her just shy of five thousand dollars, an amount that felt arbitrary to her. Ahmed was dismayed, but she knew the government was also introducing the Canada Emergency Student Benefit, and so held out hope. That would be where she’d fit. But it excluded her, too. Only those who had finished in December 2019 or later were eligible. It included students who were starting in the fall, but not graduate students, like her. She also hadn’t accumulated enough hours to qualify for EI. She felt like she was being punished for graduating too early and finding a job too late. She had always done what everyone tells young adults to do if they want a happy, prosperous life, and somehow it still hadn’t worked out. “I went to post-secondary. I got the degree. I’ve never gotten into any trouble,” she said. “And so, here I was a productive member of society. I had gotten the job. I was ready to work the forty hours on that job. Then I lost that job because of circumstances that were completely out of my hands—circumstances that nobody saw coming.” And nothing existed to catch her.

  Ahmed went into survival mode. It’s a place, she noted, that she’s been in before. Her parents immigrated to Canada from Somalia, and Ahmed grew up in subsidized housing in the Kitchener, Ontario, area. As she put it, “You don’t have the luxury to not think about money. It’s always in the back of your mind.” Once she moved to Toronto for school, she’d always been adamant about ensuring she could sustain herself. To her, the pandemic felt like old worry: worry about paying her bills, worry about paying rent, worry about spending money on any necessity, worry about spending money on something that she didn’t really need, worry about spending any money at all. Sometimes, she felt angry and frustrated. She’d done everything right, followed all the advice, and it still felt like she had done nothing right. To make it through, she had to dip into her savings—money that she’d planned to use to pay off her student debt. She had to remind herself that it wasn’t her fault; she’d done her due diligence. Her friends and family helped. She used them as a support system whenever she needed to vent. To help keep her mental health intact, she also turned to advocacy organizations, joining Don’t Forget Students. The national campaign has worked to bring awareness to people who were in a similar, if not the exact same, boat as Ahmed. It gave her a sense of connection, eased the gnawing sense of helplessness.

  In early August, Ahmed shared her story on the organization’s Twitter account. She wasn’t quite sure what to expect. Ahmed is a self-described open, talkative person, but she rarely used Twitter. She wanted to be honest, and she was. It was the first time she truly took in the difficulty, and trauma, of the previous few months—really, of the past few years; trying to make it through school in Toronto had put her into survival mode, too, more than once. She hadn’t shared the full extent of her hustle with her friends and family, hadn’t shared all the times she struggled to eat, hadn’t told anybody how close to the line she lived in Toronto, wha
t it took to keep up. Doing so now made her feel exposed. But she wanted people to know how bad it could be; she wanted to make a difference. “I don’t come from Bill Morneau’s world,” she wrote, referencing her local member of Parliament (who, incidentally, she said she’d reached out to earlier for help, with no response). “I’m a Black, Muslim woman, born to first-generation immigrants.” She continued: “It’s been six months since the beginning of Canada’s emergency response to COVID-19. I still haven’t received any financial support from the federal government.” The reaction to her Twitter thread was immediate and overwhelming. People were outraged. Hundreds of them retweeted the post. Many of them called on their own MPs to help.

  The experience helped reiterate what motivated her to pursue politics in the first place: every person’s responsibility to fight against injustice. Her own experiences as a Black, Muslim woman had shown her that people can face the grind of injustice every day. At the same time, many feasible, non-radical solutions—like universal basic income—existed and could, arguably, be easily implemented. Those solutions could help so many people. “So, there’s no excuses, right?” said Ahmed. When we spoke, she told me that she wasn’t sure what her dream job would be. She wanted to try a few things: working in government, working for a non-profit, and, sure, one day running for office. She shared that, after Morneau resigned later that month amid the WE Charity controversy, one of her friends held an intervention. “Look,” he told her. “You have to run for Morneau’s seat.” He wouldn’t leave her alone about it. “I’m serious,” he said. “You’ve got to do it.” She told him, not yet. She was still figuring things out. But the idea of one day shaking up the status quo? Of doing leadership differently? Of setting a tone of compassion and action, not cynicism and apathy? Well, yes, that all sounded like a future she wanted.