The pandemic and economic downturn are ‘hitting women hardest’

Linda Scott has spent years collecting data on gender inequality and exploring the dark history of female subjugation. As an academic researcher, she has documented the first-hand experience of obstacles to women’s economic advance towards equality, from villages in Ghana and Uganda to the campuses of US business schools.

But it was the coronavirus pandemic that brought the issues to her doorstep, in the form of her young granddaughter.

With US nursery schools emptying for lockdown and hospitals filling up with cases of Covid-19, Prof Scott’s daughter, an emergency room doctor, was suddenly on constant call. Meanwhile, her architect son-in-law was diverted to urgent projects refitting factories to produce emergency supplies.