The COVID-19 pandemic has directly impacted women's work, imposing additional challenges and burdens on them under unsuitable working conditions. It has also added family burdens due to the closure of nurseries, the shift to distance learning, business closures, and curfew periods, prompting women to withdraw from the labor market.
Women are considered the most affected in both the formal and informal labor sectors due to the closure of projects that accompanied the pandemic, which imposed a difficult economic situation. Burdens accumulated on them, and psychological pressure and stress increased on working women, whose withdrawal from the labor market led to a significant increase in the unemployment rate among women, reaching during the year 2021.
Al-Dustour contacted a number of working women who were negatively impacted by the pandemic. Tasneem Shaker, a housewife and mother of three with a university degree, said she preferred to work from home making handicrafts for her children. She said her desire to work from home stemmed from the desire to care for her children and be by their side.
She added that the Corona pandemic has both negative and positive aspects. On the one hand, it has changed people's lifestyle in the shopping process, and the trend has shifted to remote shopping "online" without the need to go out to the markets. The seller no longer has to spend money promoting his product, which has reduced the financial burden. On the other hand, the pandemic has led to a decline in income. Many women who work in handicrafts, and I am one of them, used to participate in bazaars and the income was very good. However, with the pandemic, raw materials piled up and demand declined significantly, which affected me economically.
Rania Yassin, who owns a production kitchen that specializes only in sweets and events, said: “I have been making sweets for years, and this has been a source of income for me and my husband. With the coronavirus, I have been unable to deliver orders due to the curfew and the ban on events. Our situation has deteriorated, and we are now living on only one source of income. Even two years after the pandemic ended, I and many other women are trying to recover from its effects, but I cannot work outside the home due to my family circumstances.”
For his part, Hamada Abu Nijmeh, head of the Workers' House Center for Studies, told Al-Dustour that the families of workers suffered from a lack of resources, especially those working in the informal economy, in which working women constitute a large percentage. Their suffering was exacerbated by the difficulty of balancing childcare and work, while flexible work patterns, including remote work, did not succeed in helping women achieve this balance due to the lack of comprehensive legal regulation for flexible work forms, the nature of work relationships, and the rights and obligations arising from them, as a result of the failure to issue a system for flexible work, which the Labor Law required to be issued in the amendments made to it in 2019.
The burden of women's social role in motherhood, childcare, and housework has doubled duri