Digital Transformation during COVID 19. Opportunities and Challenges in Saudi Arabia. Secondary research.
Digital Transformation during COVID 19. Opportunities and Challenges in Saudi Arabia. Secondary research.
– This opinion piece is part of a series of articles commissioned by UNIDO’s Department of Policy Research and Statistics. The views expressed in this article are those of the author based on her experience and on prior research and do not necessarily reflect the views of UNIDO (read more).
Digital technologies are widely perceived as a promising means to promote gender equality in education, the labour market, access to financing and healthcare, among others.
The COVID-19 crisis has accelerated digitalization processes in both services and manufacturing in most countries, albeit at varying speeds, triggered by the requirements for social distancing and other COVID-19-related regulations imposed by governments around the world, and by changing consumer demand throughout the pandemic.
The COVID-19 pandemic has adversely affected women by exposing them to higher health risks and higher risk of becoming unemployed in addition to the burden of household and caregiving responsibilities during the lockdown.
We explore some of the lessons learned about the impacts of the pandemic on gender equality and, more generally, in how far digital transformation can potentially benefit women.
The COVID-19 crisis has accelerated digitalization, but has had adverse impacts on women
The COVID-19 crisis has accelerated the digital transformation trends around the globe, as evidenced in the development and expansion of digital infrastructure; the shift to digital delivery of services by firms and within organizations, for instance, in education, healthcare and retail; and increased implementation of digital technologies in manufacturing. Although the pandemic has had a negative impact on many businesses, it has also uncovered new opportunities for entrepreneurship. It has boosted digital entrepreneurship, for instance, reflecting changing consumer behaviour during and in the aftermath of the pandemic.
The recession associated with the COVID-19 pandemic is often referred to as a “shecession”, as it has taken a disproportionate toll on women in most countries. Although the pandemic has affected women around the world differently, it has exposed previously overlooked gender biases, such as the gender-racial-gap.
Looking at health risk, for instance, we find that Black women in the United States are more vulnerable and at higher risk of dying from COVID-19 than Black men or White women (Bertocchi and Dimico, 2021).
The authors attribute this to higher exposure of Black women to the risk of contagion in low-wage jobs in essential services, such as the healthcare, transportation and warehousing sectors, where they are overrepresented and which preclude remote working.
Historically, Black women have been engaged in precarious work. Moreover, mothers suffered significantly more job losses than fathers and women without children (Alon et al., 2021).
The working hours of self-employed women—and consequently their income—decreased to a greater extent than self-employed men’s.
That is, self-employed women lost working hours and income at a higher rate in addition to fulfilling family obligations, including home schooling, facing industrial gender segregation, and being more inclined to run non-employing businesses and to working part time (Reuschke et al., 2021).
What is of particular concern is that gendered attitudes seem to have changed during the pandemic, certainly not in favour of women. For instance, West German fathers’ egalitarian attitudes towards maternal employment had been steadily increasing in the pre-pandemic period but dropped considerably during the pandemic.
This development is troubling, as it suggests that the COVID-19 crisis has not only influenced the short-term allocation of household chores, it has also reversed the positive trend towards more egalitarian gender roles.
The reversal of this trend could leave women with less time to engage in productive remunerated work and inhibit female empowerment in the post-pandemic period (Danzer et al., 2021).
Adoption of Industry 4.0 technologies will likely accelerate in the post-pandemic era, potentially putting women at risk of losing their jobs
A trend that was already evident before the outbreak of the pandemic and which is expected to intensify in the post-pandemic period is the adoption of Industry 4.0 technologies.
These technologies can broadly be classified into four types: 1) connectivity, data and computational power; 2) analytics and intelligence; 3) human-machine interface; and 4) advanced engineering.
According to a recent McKinsey study (Agrawal et al., 2020), the role of Industry 4.0 technologies for achieving resilience has become even more critical in the aftermath of the pandemic, with 90 per cent of surveyed manufacturing and supply chain professionals reporting that they plan to invest in talent for digitization.
Adoption of certain Industry 4.0 technologies, for instance, the use of industrial Internet of Things or operator assistance through augmented reality in digital performance management, can be realized without massive technology investments, irrespective of a firm’s existing technology infrastructure.
The accelerated adoption of Industry 4.0 technologies will likely affect workers who perform tasks that can be replaced or modified by using these technologies. Some Industry 4.0 technologies will have labour-displacing effects, while others will enhance workers’ productivity or improve occupational safety.
Major gender gaps are evident in terms of the effects of digital technologies on workers’ jobs. Women in developing and transition economies are considerably less likely than men to possess the necessary skills that can safeguard them from the detrimental effects of digitalization, namely analytical, non-routine manual, interpersonal, advanced ICT and socio-emotional skills (Sorgner, 2019, 2021).
This observation is robust across sectors, but gender differences are more pronounced in the manufacturing sector than in services, a sector that is witnessing defeminization trends. At the same time, women are also less likely to benefit from the labour-reinstating effects of digital technologies.