School of Social and Political Science

Description

The Centre of African Studies in collaboration with IASH (Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities) are delighted to invite you to the following seminar:

The gendered effects of the Covid-19 crisis in the labour market and the home in South Africa – taking a longer-term view

Speaker: Professor Daniela Casale, School of Economics and Finance at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits University), Johannesburg

Co-badged by IASH

There is substantial global evidence to suggest that initially women were disproportionately affected by the Covid-19 crisis and the associated lockdowns. Studies from a range of countries showed that women were far more likely than men to lose their jobs or to work fewer hours during the first wave of lockdowns, and that they took on more of the additional care work in the home following school closures. There has been much less work analysing the recovery period through a gendered lens, and specifically whether women’s employment has returned to pre-Covid levels at the same rate as men’s, or whether instead gender inequality in the labour market has deepened since the crisis. There has also been little research on the changing distribution of unpaid labour in the home. Have men and women reverted to the pre-Covid division of care work in the home or did the crisis prove transformative, redistributing care in more equal ways? In this seminar, I will begin by presenting a brief overview of the gendered patterns of paid and unpaid work in the post-apartheid period in South Africa to provide some context for the more recent period; I will then describe the differential effects of the Covid-19 crisis on men and women in South Africa based on real-time survey data collected during the first year of the crisis; finally, I will reflect on ongoing work and directions for future research on the ‘after-effects’ of the crisis. 

When: Wednesday 24th January 2024 (3.30-5pm)

Where: Hugh Robson Building, Lecture  Theatre G.04

To attend this event: Please register on Eventbrite.

Speaker Biogrpahy:

Daniela Casale is a Professor in the School of Economics and Finance at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and currently a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh. Daniela is an applied development economist with over twenty years’ experience in the field of feminist economics specifically. Other cross-cutting areas of study include labour, household, health, and education economics. She has published widely across a range of economics, development studies, and public health journals, among them, Feminist Economics, Economic Development and Cultural Change, Economics and Human Biology, Journal of Development Studies, Public Health Nutrition and PLOS One. She is currently an editor at Development Southern Africa and president of the Economics Society of South Africa. Her two main research projects currently involve examining gender wealth gaps in South Africa, and investigating the ongoing impact of the Covid-19 crisis on women’s labour market outcomes and care work.