What does COVID-19 mean for Gender and the Economy?
Fireside Chat: What does COVID-19 mean for Gender and the Economy? Next Gen Men's Executive Director, Jake Stika, and Dr. Sarah Kaplan discuss how this pandemic is gendered, impacting the economy, and the future of work.
Diversity and Inclusion as Resilience Strategy Sarah opens by challenging the common view that diversity and inclusion are secondary business priorities. Organizations that had already built inclusive practices — flexible work arrangements, disability accommodations, remote work infrastructure — were far better equipped to weather the disruption of COVID-19. She argues that fine-tuning organizations purely for short-term profit makes them fragile, while building systems that accommodate diverse needs creates the resilience required to survive crises. The pandemic, in this light, is a stress test that reveals inclusion as essential infrastructure, not a peripheral initiative.
The Gendered Impacts of COVID-19 The conversation highlights how the pandemic's consequences are far from gender-neutral. Women are absorbing the bulk of unpaid childcare and domestic labor, experiencing spikes in domestic violence, and disproportionately working in healthcare. Men, shaped by socialization around risk-taking and stoicism, are dying from COVID-19 at higher rates and facing deep identity challenges as their traditional roles as providers and protectors are disrupted. Critically, these impacts are further compounded by race, with stark disparities — such as Black Americans comprising 70% of COVID deaths in Chicago while representing 30% of the population — illustrating why an intersectional lens is essential.
Rethinking Systems: GDP, Policy, and Gender-Based Analysis Both speakers point to the crisis as an opening to question long-entrenched systems. GDP, originally designed to measure wartime production, fails to capture the unpaid labor that makes the entire paid economy function — and feminist economists have been making this case for decades. Universal Basic Income, gender-based analysis (GBA+) in government budgeting, and inclusive design principles (illustrated through examples like curb cuts and snow-plowing priorities) are all tools that could be deployed more boldly. The key insight is that gender analysis must be embedded at the design stage of policy — not applied afterward as an evaluation checkbox.
Masculinity, Transformation, and the Road Ahead Jake and Sarah discuss how rigid gender norms harm everyone, and why the language around "toxic masculinity," while diagnostically accurate, can be counterproductive if it feels like an attack on men rather than an invitation to liberate them. COVID is forcing many men into caregiving roles they previously avoided, and the speakers express cautious optimism that this shift could be lasting. They also address the urgent need to attract men into growing "pink collar" sectors like nursing and early childhood education as male-dominated industries transform — arguing that this economic transition is fundamentally a gender conversation, and one that must begin now, not after recovery is already underway.