Clark Muntean, whose research focuses on gender and entrepreneurship, applies her expertise in the area to the challenges faced by women entrepreneurs during the pandemic in her chapter of the recently released book, “Women and Global Entrepreneurship.” Her chapter, “Contextualizing the experiences of women entrepreneurs and comparative responses to challenges during a global pandemic,” explains how the pandemic impacted women on several levels, including family, economics and work, and health and well-being.
“This is what social scientists view as a natural experiment, where you have a shock to the system. And then you look at data before the shock and data after the shock, and that event can reveal a lot of things,” Clark Muntean said.
“I argue in this book chapter that the pandemic and the immediate shutdowns that happened across the globe revealed substantial structural and cultural support inequities in the system such that women are disproportionately negatively impacted.”
That disproportionate negative impact was partly due to many of the customer- and service-facing industries that were forced to close during the pandemic, such as retail, restaurants, personal services. Those are sectors in which women are overrepresented. The second main reason women were negatively impacted by the pandemic involves childcare.
“That was the one I felt, myself,” Clark Muntean said, who homeschooled her child while schools, childcare and camps were shutdown, while continuing her work as a faculty member.
Those negative impacts could have long-term repercussions, Clark Muntean explained.
“The extent to which women are leaving the workforce is very troubling,” Clark Muntean said. “If the trendline is continued and we don't close the gap, then we're at risk of losing a lot of leverage and the slow gains we've had over the past several decades with women's equality in the workplace, and in economic equality, and equality of opportunity and representation of leadership. All those very slow gains…those are going to go backwards, and we're actually going to lose ground.”
Understanding the impact of the pandemic on women through research like this is crucial to determining how to move forward from the pandemic, Clark Muntean explained.
“The women that are single mothers, that aren't college educated, that are in the marginalized economic sector, they are the hardest hit. And so, the first response should be attending to those women,” Clark Muntean said. “There are programs specifically designed for women and specifically designed for women business owners, and we really just haven't had a gender-aware response to the pandemic that attends to those issues.”
The U.S. can draw lessons about gender-aware responses from other countries—especially developing nations, Clark Muntean said. She hopes that her work and the work of others in “Women and Global Entrepreneurship” will help inform a wide audience about these issues, and the possibilities for addressing them.
“The book is directed at policymakers, as well as students and scholars, and a general audience that are interested in this topic about gender equality and how pandemic impacts gender equality,” Clark Muntean said, “and how governmental policy responses, and responses of non-governmental organizations, are different across the globe, and what needs to be done in the future in terms of being more responsive to the needs of girls and women.”
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