Trent's Dr. Melanie Buddle investigates the evolving role of the modern businesswoman and what it means for gender equality
The long-term social impacts of COVID-19 may take many years to understand, but the regressive effect on gender equality — a ‘she-cession’— is a challenge that experts like Dr. Melanie Buddle are already calling out.
Dr. Buddle, a Trent historian and principal of Peter Gzowski College, is an expert in the business of women, focusing on the challenges and opportunities faced by female entrepreneurs. She has observed the disproportionate impact the pandemic has had on self-employed women.
“I think what we’ve seen is the same thing with entrepreneurship that we saw with women having to leave the workforce during the pandemic,” Dr. Buddle recently told the Toronto Star. “And it’s because their kids were at home because of home-schooling. Smaller businesses and businesses that you were running from home become very difficult to operate if you have kids underfoot.”
Dr. Buddle also adds that this “she-cession” could further worsen the gender pay gap (women earn 87 cents for every dollar men do, according to Statistics Canada), noting that a 2020 Deloitte Global survey of 400 women that found seven out of ten women who experienced negative shifts in their routine due to the pandemic believed that their career progression would also slow down.
