Among other things, social inequality has caused a spike in the number of women exiting the workforce. Alanna Imbach, Founder/CEO of Vibe Coworks shares her insights on how she believes the coworking community can address this and help bring women back into the workforce.
Women being forced out of the workforce
In the States particularly, schools were shut down for extended periods of time. And even when they came back online, it was then online remote schooling, and that burden of how to manage the household when everyone is home fell very disproportionately on women. It’s not at all to say that there weren’t men who were also leading the education side of things. It wasn’t so much that women were being fired from their jobs, they literally could not manage their professional responsibilities and duties and careers on top of trying to keep the kids online for school.
For some families, it came down to finances. And if we go back to unequal pay between genders, when you’re making the decision, you’re looking at it. So one of us has got to stay home for a bit, to manage our childcare, to manage our parental care for people that have more elderly parents. And if the wife is paid less, then it becomes a math game of well, that’s the one that we got to give up, because we have to keep the higher paying job.
How coworking spaces can contribute to solving social inequality
The community element that coworking spaces offer is at the heart of it all. That’s the one thing that a lot of people don’t get about coworking spaces until they’ve been in that environment. That’s, in some ways, one of the upsides of all the shapeshifting that’s happened over these last couple of years as people are, are trying things that they wouldn’t have tried before. And then they’re being pleasantly surprised or catching the magic of it.
Fostering equality in coworking events
One of the most talked-about things in coworking is, how can we, by virtue of all of these connections and relationships that we do have within our coworking circle currently, start to build a directory that is inclusive of all members, speakers, and panels in the coworking industry.
Nobody has all these questions figured out. So the more that we can have these conversations together and learn what’s happening, what’s working, what’s not working in other places, the faster we’ll be able to move forward for sure.
For more information on this topic, head over to: https://coworkingassembly.eu/podcast/systemic-inequality-women-coworking/