A Study on Career Progression of Women during Covid- 19

The COVID-19 pandemic situation is harming the health, social and economic well-being worldwide, and with women at the centre. First and foremost of women are major leading the health response: women structure almost 70% of the health care workforce, exposing them to a greater risk of infection. At an equivalent time, women also are shouldering much of the burden reception, given school and child care facility closures and longstanding gender inequalities in unpaid work. And the women also faced high risks of job and income loss, and face increased risks of violence, and exploitation, abuse or harassment during times of crisis and quarantine. Policy responses must be immediate, which they need to account for women’s concerns. Governments should consider adopting emergency measures to help parents manage work and caring responsibilities, reinforcing and increasing income support measures, expanding support for small businesses and thus the self-employed, and improving measure to assist women victims of violence. Finally, all the rules and policy responses to the crisis must embed a gender lens and account for women’s unique needs, responsibilities and perspectives.

The COVID-19 pandemic situation is harming the health, social and economic well-being worldwide, and with women at the centre. First and foremost of women are major leading the health response: women structure almost 70% of the health care workforce, exposing them to a greater risk of infection. At an equivalent time, women also are shouldering much of the burden reception, given school and child care facility closures and longstanding gender inequalities in unpaid work. And the women also faced high risks of job and income loss, and face increased risks of violence, and exploitation, abuse or harassment during times of crisis and quarantine. Policy responses must be immediate, which they need to account for women's concerns. Governments should consider adopting emergency measures to help parents manage work and caring responsibilities, reinforcing and increasing income support measures, expanding support for small businesses and thus the selfemployed, and improving measure to assist women victims of violence. Finally, all the rules and policy responses to the crisis must embed a gender lens and account for women's unique needs, responsibilities and perspectives.

INTRODUCTION
Career Progression is that the process of climbing the ladder during your working life. Moving forward, being promoted, and finding new challenges, new employers, and new opportunities and getting the foremost out of career. career progression is not simply as finding better jobs but as staying in current jobs and roles too, while receiving greater responsibility, satisfaction and success (whatever each individual defines 'success' to be). Career progression isn't simply about finding a replacement and 'better' job, but it's also about receiving a pay rise, being given additional responsibilities, moving sideways during a company and can even be the method of leaving a corporation and starting your own venture or company.
The current COVID-19 crisis deeply impacts women, men, girls, and boys and other genders differently. While men structure the bulk of these who have died from the virus, women and girls bear the brunt of disproportionate care burdens, disruptions in income and education, poor access to health and other essential services, greater risk of being dispossessed of land and property, and gender digital and pay gaps. For women already living in poverty, theseimpacts are often a shock to their economic stability overall and impede their ability to get critical necessities, like medicine and food.
Around the world, women perform much more care work than men -up to 10 times the maximum amount consistent with the OECD Development Centre's Social Institutions and Gender Index (SIGI). The travel restrictions, athome quarantines, school and day-care centre closures, and therefore the increased risks faced by elderly relatives are often expected to impose additional burdens on women, even when both women and their partners are confined and should be expected to continue performing from home. Crucially, lockdown situations exacerbate risks of violence, exploitation, abuse or harassment against women, as has been seen from previous crises and from the primary case of China during the COVID crisis. And despite all this, women's voices are still not well represented within the media. And also this risks leaving their expertise unheard and their perspectives ignored within the policy response to the crisis.
This policy brief shines a light-weight on a number of the key challenges faced by women during the continued COVID 19 pandemic, and proposes early steps that governments can fancy mitigate negative consequences for ladies and for society at large. Many of those policies affect both women and men, but special attention must be dedicated to reducing instead of exacerbating existing gender inequalities.

REVIEW OF LITERATURE
Over the course of 2020, Covid-19 has been transforming the planet in increasingly challenges that we cannot yet fully fathom. Family work-life balance was already id with occupational burn-out and over-reliance on digital devices. A growing specialize in "wellness" because the panacea to all or any or any of this work intensification has led critics. The COVID 19 pandemic is creating a profound shock worldwide, with different implications for men and ladies . Women are serving on the frontlines against COVID 19, and thus the impact of the crisis on women is stark. Women face compounding burdens: they're over-represented working in health systems, still do the majority of unpaid care add households, face high risks of economic insecurity (both today and tomorrow), and face increased risks of violence, exploitation, abuse or harassment during times of crisis and quarantine. The pandemic has had and may still have a significant impact on the health and well-being of the various vulnerable groups (OECD, 2020). Actions taken by employers will be critical in women's working advancement post-pandemic the data from this survey highlights the difficulties women face in balancing their multiple responsibilities at home and at work, with no certainty on when the pandemic will end or when their lives will ever revisit to "normal." Yet, our survey respondents were also clear about how their employers can support them.
Taking under consideration what the ladies we surveyed saw as barriers to their progression and what they said would be helpful, we've come up with the subsequent list of steps for organizations to think about to assist safeguard efforts to realize gender diversity. The findings point to 6 steps that organizations can implement now to support their workers both during and after the pandemic.
Make flexible working the norm. With work/life balance cited because the biggest concern when it involves future progression, and more flexible working options being the foremost significant thing that employers can do to support those surveyed, it's clear employers cannot ignore the importance of flexible working with regard to the retention and progression of girls. Flexible working doesn't just mean "working from home," something that has become quite commonplace during the pandemic. It can mean working arrangements that enable the individual to possess a manageable work/life balance and still benefit the business -whether that be reduced work hours; working longer, but fewer days each week; or job sharing.
Flexible working can't be a "nice to have" that applies only to parents-it may be a necessity for all. In addition to having the proper policies and versatile working options in situ , this also means cultivating a workplace culture that supports employees taking advantage of flexible working policies without any fear of career penalty. Without this supportive culture, it's unlikely that flexible working are going to be fully embedded within a business. Leading with empathy and trust. As working lives are disrupted by the pandemic, the necessity for leaders and managers to possess open and supportive conversations with their teams has never been higher. Forty-four percent of respondents said they might wish to have regular and deliberate check-ins with leaders who genuinely want to ask their employees if they're okay. Leading sympathetically promotes an open and empathetic culture which will build trust among employers and employees. Open dialogues also can help leaders understand the short-term constraints their employees could also be facing, and support them, in order that their long-term prospects within their organizations could also be secured. Promote networking, mentorship and sponsorship as ways to find out and grow-but make sure that this is often wiped out ways and sometimes that accommodate different schedules and wishes . Nearly half respondents cited the supply of leadership, mentoring, networking, and sponsorship opportunities as beneficial to their careers. These resources are often meaningful platforms for career growth.
However, it's important to make sure that such opportunities are offered during a sort of ways and times to make sure more women in your workforce can leverage them. For example, only hosting early morning networking breakfasts that clash with responsibilities reception will likely end in some women feeling excluded. Create learning opportunities that fit within your employees' daily lives. Our survey respondents indicated that they were keen to progress in their careers and combat more responsibilities, despite additional constraints imposed by the pandemic. Yet, professional development courses may check out of reach to several immediately, with one in three women saying they're unable to balance their work and life commitments because of pandemicrelated shifts to their lives. Employers should introduce creative approaches to learning that allow their employees to access the expertise and support they have in flexible and practical ways-for example, curated digital learning that is relevant to the individual's development and provided during a way that permits each employee to settle on when and where to access it.
Make sure that reward, succession and promotion processes address unconscious bias. More than half the respondents said the foremost beneficial actions their organizations could fancy support them is to market them or give them pay raises. While structuring reward and promotion processes to affect the danger of unconscious bias has always been important, the pandemic has introduced the need for several organizations to look at contribution in several ways, including within the context of remote working and unavoidable commitments outside work. Addressing the danger of unconscious bias in these processes, including because it relates to perceptions of women's caregiving responsibilities, is more important than ever. Especially, make diversity, respect, and inclusion non-negotiable and ensure they're experienced in your company's everyday culture. Thirty percent of girls who question progressing in their career cited non-inclusive behaviours-like micro-aggressions and exclusion from meetings and projects-as reasons why they question whether or not they want to progress within their organization.
While an employer may have diversity and inclusion policies in situ, it's the "everyday behaviours" experienced by employees which may determine whether or not they believe that diversity and inclusion may be a real priority. No inclusive behaviours within the workplace can occur both within the office and remotely: these got to be addressed head-on through clear messaging, training, and action. As employers and leaders, we must do all we'll to help the women in our workforces adapt to this challenging work/ life reality. This next year will prove critical in our efforts to form sure gender parity within the workplace. Businesses must prioritize flexibility, equity, and inclusivity if women are to understand their career ambitions. Michele Parmelee Global Deputy CEO and Chief People & Purpose Officer Women's careers within the time of coronavirus. Over the course of 2020, Covid-19 has been transforming the planet in ways during which we cannot yet fully fathom. Family work-life balance was already increasingly challenged with occupational burn-out and over-reliance on digital devices. A growing concentrate on "wellness" because the panacea to all or any or any or any of this work intensification has led critics like Carl Cederström and André Spicer to underscore the ways during which such a "wellness syndrome" commands more work -and guilt -out of alreadyoverworked individuals. That's why the slowdown imposed by the pandemic has been in some ways welcomed by working parents. We are just starting to reckon with what the pandemic has meant to families and careers. Three decades after Arlie Hochschild documented the working mothers' "second shift", the pandemic has further amplified preexisting gender gaps, and much of the burden remains being borne by women.
Beyond struggling to require care of the family's physical and mental state during lockdown, there's also the struggle of holding down employment. Epidemics spell trouble for all folks , but women can often be hit in ways during which do not have anything to undertake to to with the disease itself: In 2005 the UN Women's commission reported the disastrous effects of the HIV/AIDS pandemic for women's and girl's rights in developing nations. Socio-historical studies have illuminated a gendered "duty to care" ethos that fell squarely on women's shoulders during the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic. This era of history is not any different: commentators note that we are again witnessing the silent erosion of women's rights as gendered roles are reinforced by the pandemic. The "second shift" of working mothers Men are increasingly sharing a greater portion of unpaid labor within the "second shift", but women still carry the heavier load of domestic responsibilities and receiving significantly more household-demand interruptions in their already-limited working hours.
Although flexible work has functioned well for several during Covid-19, it's negatively affected many women's career goals and productivity levels. A telling example: academic journal submissions are up by 25% as compared to a non Covid-19 context, yet most of the articles are submitted by men. Along these lines, a recent presentation of our research on flexible work and careers and ongoing data collection shows that indeed there is a gendered effect when it involves who benefits most from flexible work, and it's not women. What does this instance tell us about the socially constructed nature of gender roles, the facility dynamics of career and gender, and thus the pandemic's redistribution of unpaid labor? Among others, it tells us about societal expectations and pressures to evolve. Whereas men are encouraged to strengthen productivity with flexible working and reap the rewards for such, women are expected to adopt a versatile working arrangement to extend their unpaid labor capacity -more family and residential responsibilities. This suggests putting the rewards of the paid job on the sidelines to stress for others, and possibly jeopardizing their careers.

FINDINGS
 A majority of women working in technology face lockdown barriers to career progression, according to a new report by cybersecurity firm Kaspersky.  According to the report, 76 per cent of Indian women in tech believe that the effects ofCovid-19 have delayed their career progression.  54 per cent of Indian women feel that gender equality is more likely to be achieved through remote working structures, the business line report said.  The other significant trend that the pandemic has accelerated is the co-existence of remote and hybrid employees within the same organization. This can be a challenge for women working remotely as they may experience less access to top management working from offices. This may decrease their chances to be considered for the kind of stretch assignments that lead to promotions.  The survey shows women have more responsibility for household chores (65%), and a third said their workloads have increased due to the pandemic. As a result of the increased work pressure for home and work, women said it impacted their physical well-being (40%), made it difficult to balance work and home commitments (40%) and also impacted their mental health causing stress and burnout (39%).  As COVID-19 continues to affect lives and livelihoods around the world, we can already see that the pandemic and its economic fallout are having a regressive effect on gender equality.  In addition to juggling new, increased home and work responsibilities, many women went without pay due to school closures. Almost half (47%) of working mothers said they took unpaid sick leave because their child's school or daycare was closed. This rose to 65% among low-income mothers and 70% among those working part-time jobs.  Family caregiving responsibilities before and after the pandemic have largely fallen on women. More than one in ten women report they were caring for a family member who needed special assistance prior to the pandemic. Over one in ten women report that they have new caregiving responsibilities as a result of the pandemic.

SUGGESTIONS
 Here are 5 career tips to help you navigate your career development during the pandemic.  Be Willing to Change your Previous Thoughts and Beliefs about Careers -Throughout this pandemic, your idea of career growth, career transition, and job stability and security is likely changing  See Your Career as a Journey -In career development, we analyze different career metaphors. For example, careers as roles, careers as relationships, careers as cycles, and more.  Be Open to New Opportunities and Be Patient -Job seekers today need to give themselves patience and grace like never before. With the labour market slowly re-opening, they should be on the lookout to upcoming opportunities but keep in mind that opportunities in their field may be few and far between -if they even come up at all.  Honour the Space between No Longer and Not Yet -The pandemic is forcing many people into uncomfortable situations and fast. You need to realize what is in your control and out of your control.  Re-Assess Your Current Job -It is very likely that you are thinking through your current job situation during this time. You may be realizing what's really important to you during this pandemic and maybe the job you have right now isn't keeping you fulfilled, your employer hasn't been dealing with the pandemic the way you hoped they would, your job is more unstable than you thought it would be, or maybe you're realizing that this hasn't been right for quite some time now

CONCLUSION
The COVID 19 pandemic is harming health, social and economic wellbeing worldwide, with women at the centre. First and foremost, women are leading the health response: women structure almost 70% of the health care workforce, exposing them to a greater risk of infection. At an equivalent time, women also are shouldering much of the burden reception , given school and child care facility closures and longstanding gender inequalities in unpaid work. Women also face high risks of job and income loss, and face increased risks of violence, exploitation, abuse or harassment during times of crisis and quarantine. Policy responses must be immediate, which they need to account for women's concerns. Governments should consider adopting emergency measures to help parents manage work and caring responsibilities, reinforcing and increasing income support measures, expanding support for small businesses and thus the self-employed, and improving measure to assist women victims of violence. Fundamentally, all policy responses to the crisis must embed a gender lens and account for women's unique needs, responsibilities and perspectives.