FROM March to May 2020 the public and politicians stood on their doorsteps on Thursday evenings at 8pm to “clap for carers”.

While people gathered to honour and show their appreciation for health workers and then carers across our social care system, those same workers were struggling to access proper PPE and elderly people were being discharged into residential care homes without being tested for ­Covid-19. While the “battle” against the virus continued, the “heroes” of the NHS “fought” to save life amidst political slogans and public health messages.

In the strangled military language that dominated reporting and commentary as the pandemic peaked, the “collateral damage” was revealed to be black and minority ethnic workers and other disadvantaged members of the community, mainly older ­people and low-income workers. Among those dying from the virus and its complications, and among those working to protect and provide for the general population, significant inequalities were immediately revealed. This chapter considers some of those inequalities of experience, with a particular focus on the gendered dimensions of paid and unpaid care.

The experience of Covid-19 at the individual, household, community, and country level has revealed and ­reaffirmed our social and economic reliance on care. We have all, to ­different degrees, been engaged in providing and receiving care while many among us, especially disabled people, have been overlooked and left on the margins.

Public policy and public attitudes have not been formulated around a practice of having care as a starting point or understanding that care forms the core structure of our ­social and economic life. Despite our ­complete reliance on the provision of care – as parents, kinship carers, unpaid carers for family and friends, and accessing health and social care through our public services across our life courses – care has continually been undervalued economically and socially. Until now. As policy makers, politicians, commentators, as well as everyone else, seek to carve a pathway through a new Covid reality, we have an opportunity and a responsibility to shift our collective commitment to valuing care and supporting investment in care as integral to our social and economic wellbeing.

The undervaluing of care and its over provision by women are not new, and have been the focus of feminist economics analysis over many decades. They are of course entirely interlinked. Care is undervalued because it has been considered the domain of women – of women’s work in the domestic and, increasingly in, the public sphere.

The gendered dimensions that structure social behaviours have in turn shaped economic thinking. This has resulted in the significant contribution that care makes to economic activity and to shoring up the ­productive economy being ignored and instead perceived as a cost to public finance and a drag on ­economic participation. This perception of care constitutes core elements of the gender pay gap, including the labour market segregation that ­concentrates women across jobs and sectors in the care economy.

Gendered patterns of care provision were well established before the pandemic shook their foundations. According to Engender, “between 59% and 70% of unpaid care is delivered by women in Scotland, worth approximately £10.8 billion to the economy per annum, and women are twice as likely to give up work to carry out unpaid care”. Women, on average, carry out 60% more ­unpaid work than men (ONS, 2016) a reality which was exacerbated during lockdown with women taking on ­additional childcare and housework as schools and nurseries closed

(IFS, 2020).

WHILE more men have died from Covid-19, there were more confirmed cases among women, as women’s over­representation as unpaid carers and in health and social care jobs put them at higher risk. The imbalance in caring responsibilities can also make it harder to take on or maintain paid employment. For example, the majority of lone parents are women (92%), with three-quarters of lone parent households already financially vulnerable in 2016-18 (73%), and more likely than average to be in unmanageable debt.

During the pandemic women were in the majority of designated keyworker jobs in health and social care, cleaning, and the majority employed in many ‘shut down’ sectors, such as retail (60%), accommodation (58%) and food and beverage service activities (53%). In addition, Close the Gap reminded us of the persistence of the gender pay gap, and that: ‘all sectors designated high risk have a gender pay gap. In some cases, the gender pay gap is significantly higher than the national figure of 13.3%, 11 including health and social care (27.8%), manufacturing (18%) and retail and wholesale (16%)’.

IN its graphic depiction of “spirals of inequality” the Commission for a Gender Equal Economy highlighted how the crises of gender inequality and Covid-19 collided, combining established patterns of gendered inequality that had created conditions for the gendered economic and social impacts of the pandemic. These conditions include the consequences of “austerity” such as the underfunding of social care, the withdrawal of services and funding from local authorities across the UK, and the massive reduction in household income – as social security benefits have been cut to fund tax giveaways by the Westminster government (UK Women’s Budget Group, 2020).

The global pandemic exposed the underlying inequalities and structural inadequacies that exist at individual, household, sectoral and country levels in Scotland as well as many other countries. Political choices to reduce public spending and dismantle public infrastructure have weakened public services, leaving supply chains and workforces and ill-prepared for responding to the scale needed. Underlying the frantic response to Covid-19 were the everyday inequalities and realities of poverty, poor housing, violence against women and girls, and hunger. As reported in The Guardian in March 2020, over 1.5m people in the UK were already missing at least one meal every day before lockdown, and economic collapse precipitated the escalation of access to food banks and prevalence of hunger in Scotland and the UK. These “pre-existing social and economic inequalities in the midst of ‘plenty’ should shame the countries and societies where political choices – by voters and politicians – have permitted these ‘lived effects’ to be the daily realities of millions”.

Among those most affected have been disabled people, already marginalised from public services and paid employment, with social security income lost to government cuts. Black and minority ethnic people have been dying in greater numbers, exposed to risks in low paid jobs in key worker occupations, alongside higher paid but still vulnerable healthcare professionals.

Evidence from multiple sources, including Inclusion Scotland and Glasgow Disability Alliance (GDA), demonstrated both the distance from decision-making and participation that disabled people and households continue to experience and the limitations of local services. GDA described the pandemic and lockdown measures as having “supercharged” the inequalities experienced by disabled people, as their members expressed worry and anxiety about accessing food, medicines, and money (GDA, 2020). Pressures on community level social care, community pharmacies, access to food, and personal care all reveal structural weaknesses that need to be addressed, in relation to resources and organisational structures and relations. In a highly personal account, disability rights advocate and former senior social worker Dr Jim Elder-Woodward recounted his experience of service withdrawal and the inadequacies of the current funding and management of adult social care in Scotland. He concluded that the principal lesson for public care service funding and management is that: “People with disabilities and their directly accountable organisations must be not just at the centre, but at the heart and mind of any economic, social and civic decision-making within society … If not, I fear we will be squeezed even farther to the edge of society. They’re there to be terrorised even further by the tyranny of the non-disabled majority.”

As we re-surface from the emergency of the first experiences of Covid-19, amidst the calls for building back better to a new normal, constant and sustained voices are calling for participation of disabled people, people of colour, people on low incomes, and those otherwise marginalised from decision-making in shaping the future of services and spending priorities. A consistent demand from civil society organisations has been for policy makers not to make assumptions, but to fund and use robust equalities data and evidence of the lived effects of inequality and discrimination, particularly as a politics of care is developed. This means that the promises of empowerment, participation, and engagement whether from the Scottish Government, in the provisions of the Community Empowerment Act (2015), or in the emerging ways of working on community wealth building, or even the limited commitments to participation in budget decisions, have to be more than promises.