As I pen my thoughts on a typical rainy, windy, gloomy, and chilly night in the middle of December 2021 in London – writing my last article for the PII – I thought this time of the year calls for nothing more than an honest, open, and humbling write up about our privileges. And, mainly, from an Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) perspective. A good reminder about privilege – having privileges does not mean that a person is immune to the rigours of life, but that they have the unfair benefits and benefits that society receives for their identity.
The persistent existence of intimidation, violence, humiliation, micro-aggressions, discrimination, harassment, victimisation, bias, prejudice, inequitable, stigma, and marginalisation of women, men, disabled folks, LGBTQ+ folks, black and Asian ethnic minorities (BAME) communities, and so on, has in my view, increased during the pandemic in ways that that world had never seen before.
A combination of reasons like social-inequality, hardship, and racism had made people from the BAME communities twice as likely to die from COVID-19. The pandemic has been especially hard on women – as the societal norms have played out whilst they worked at home – which has also affected research & publications. LGBTQ+ people have been disproportionately affected and were more vulnerable during this crisis. Poverty has played its usual negative role during this global catastrophe. Your well-being was two thirds more likely to be affected if you had any kind of disability – than otherwise. COVID-19 has revealed and compounded existing inequalities in wealth, race, gender, age, education, and geographical location. During the pandemic, your age directed decisions on your redundancies. It is difficult to imagine the plight of 160million child labourers around the world – which is very likely to increase.
The issue that’s close to my heart is the gender gap within the engineering sector. It is widely known that women make up only 12% of the engineering workforce. Last year, The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) published a report on gender balance which showed a stark imbalance of under-funding women scientists. For instance, only 6% of women apply for large grants over £10m and for small grants, 15% of applicants are women. There are various factors at play here such as women carrying greater administrative, teaching and pastoral duties within universities giving them the reduced time to apply for funding, less encouragement to apply for funding by line managers and obviously the conscious and unconscious biases that tend to diminish the opportunity for women. These gender differences are expected to deepen due to the COVID-19 pandemic as women in the UK are more than twice as likely to quit their job due to caring responsibilities and also spend twice the number of hours doing unpaid childcare and household activities.
Though no country has been able to avoid the negative consequences of COVID-19, some have been hit hard. These hard-hit countries are the ones that are situated towards the bottom of the global income distribution. The common troubles in these countries include employment and income losses felt most by the vulnerable workers, women and the younger people. For instance in India, working-aged women holding jobs has been dropped from already a low number of 9.7% in 2019 to 7% in 2021. This might sound like hardly any woman is in paid labour in one of the most populated countries in the world.
Source: IMFÂ
However, it is not all bad news. Thanks to Science, we had the fastest vaccine developed. And with the generosity of some organisations and a few countries – the vaccines were delivered to low-income countries as soon as they were approved. Some employers gave EDI, the importance it deserves from the very beginning. Some of the top higher-educations institutions in the UK called their own institutions institutionally & structurally racist. Artificial Intelligence, yet again, came to the rescue when ultra-high accelerated systems were required to detect outbreaks, sequence the genes of the virus, understand where resources need to be concentrated the most, and so on. Unprecedented, a word that we’ve all heard through-and-through, data sharing around the world proved to be absolutely vital during COVID-19.
