Identities

The full consequences of COVID-19 are unknown, but there are several critical factors which will accentuate its impact on girls’ education.

The consequences of COVID-19 are countless. Many of them we do not know about yet, and will only become apparent in the coming years. Nevertheless, it is clear that the pandemic has already had a dramatic impact on schooling and that students will experience it differently based on their gender. There are several critical factors which will accentuate the impact of COVID-19 on girls’ education around the world, and recovery initiatives will need to consider these gendered experiences if they are to succeed.

In the current health crisis, education is being undertaken through laptops, tablets, and smartphones outside of the classroom. However, few are discussing how these changes will exacerbate the gender digital divide. This divide, which long proceeded the spread of coronavirus, is where women and girls have less access to technology and the internet than men and boys. For instance, a recent study by the International Telecommunications Union found that the share of women worldwide using the internet is 12% lower than the share of men using the internet, and this rises to 25% in Africa. The same problem is seen with mobile phone ownership. In South Asia, for instance, women are 23% less likely than men to have their own mobile, according to the Global System for Mobile Communications Association (GSMA).

With this in mind, what happens when you impose remote studying to students across the world? It is a real possibility that many girls may never recover the time and education that they would have gained if they were able to physically go to school. Indeed, our relationship with technology will never be the same as it was before the pandemic. The way we work, shop, exercise, travel, and entertain ourselves has been revolutionised, and the majority of these changes will remain in place long after we have overcome the challenge of COVID-19. Alongside the advantages of this transformation, the hard truth is that our economies and societies will leave behind those without access to digital technologies and the skills to use them, and many of these will be women and girls.

Beyond the digital skills gap, women and girls face an additional barrier impeding their access to education. Prior to the present pandemic, research from UN Women found that women across the globe were already doing three times as much unpaid care and domestic work as men. In forcing people into their homes, coronavirus has increased this gender skew, with women taking on the bulk of the housework and care responsibilities (often combining this with their newly-remote job). Data collected by IpsosMORI in May suggests that women around the world are more likely than men to find that their care responsibilities have increased during the pandemic.

UNICEF has shown that this inequality starts from an early age, with girls between the ages of five and 14 spending 40% more time on unpaid household chores than boys of the same age. Combined, that represents 160m hours per day of time which could be spent elsewhere, including studying. What does this mean for girls who were previously going to school, and are now required to pursue their education from home? It likely translates into them having less time to focus on their schooling than previously, because their support is required on domestic tasks and care duties instead.

Furthermore, these girls might be prevented from going back to school once the pandemic is over, particularly if they need to take on new domestic tasks and care responsibilities as a result of illness or death in the family caused by COVID-19. The Malala Fund estimates that an additional 20m secondary school aged girls could be permanently out of school once this pandemic has passed. Again, this would effectively result in a generation of girls being prevented from reaching their full potential in school, with the plethora of consequences this has on the social and economic opportunities available to them later in life.

Our recovery from COVID-19 will take decades, but it is important that we think about these issues now and take the necessary steps to ensure that women and girls around the world are not disproportionately affected by the pandemic’s impact on school closures. So much effort has gone into getting girls into school to begin with that we simply cannot afford such a monumental setback.

Maëlys Bablon is a research analyst working on gender equality.

Finding the proper word to describe the diverse minority groups within Britain is about more than just semantics; it becomes an issue of finding a single word that is both accurate and respectful. In contemporary Britain, the acronym ‘BAME’ (Black, Asian, and minority ethnic) is often used as a catch-all term to describe non-white people. However, this superficially conflates Black and Asian identities and promotes a false sense of unity in favour of linguistic expediency.

Reviewing the historical dynamic between Africans and Indians in the British Caribbean exemplifies how the burden of societal injustice is seldom borne uniformly; using a single umbrella term to encapsulate an inherently diverse experience obfuscates the social realities of each group.

In the wake of the emancipation of African slaves in 1833, British plantation owners were desperate for a new source of cheap labour. To fill the labour vacuum, destitute Indians were recruited by the hundreds of thousands through the promise of a better life in the British Caribbean. Known as the indentured labour system, Indians who were otherwise unable to pay for the voyage signed a contract binding them to approximately five years of plantation labour for a fixed wage in exchange for passage to the British Caribbean. Between 1845-1917, 147,592 Indians arrived in Trinidad under the indentured labour system and an approximate total of 239,000 Indians arrived in Guyana. While slavery was technically illegal, indentured servitude became a new form of government-sanctioned ‘unfreedom’.

The influx of cheap Indian labour kept wages artificially low. Workers were unable to strike for higher wages or better treatment because the constant arrival of new Indians with contracts binding them to low-wage labour made all workers dispensable. Additionally, the draconian terms of Indian labour contracts, strictly enforced by colonial authorities, meant that any insurrection or refusal to work would result in heavy fines and imprisonment. Although initially the white plantation owners were outraged by African emancipation, the indentured labour system filled the labour vacuum as Africans moved to other occupations, which ultimately enabled the British to consolidate power and production that might have otherwise been challenged by freed Africans on their own.

Although Indian indentured labourers occupied the lowest socio-economic positions in Trinidad and Guyana, emancipated Africans generally viewed these new arrivals as an existential threat to their economic livelihood. Few freed Africans worked for their former slave masters. Rather, their newfound economic mobility had laid the foundations for a fragile yet burgeoning middle class. In his book Caribbean Masala: Indian identity in Guyana and Trinidad, Dave Ramsaran explains how “Africans, once at the bottom of the social scale, now had an easily recognisable class to which they could feel superior”. Furthermore, “Indo-Trinidadians were also hostile to African Trinidadians […] because of the colour of the Africans’ skin and the texture of their hair, Indo-Trinidadians equated them with the followers of the demon god Raavan from the Hindu Ramayana”. British colonial authorities recognised and manipulated these economic and political conditions to consolidate the social divisions amongst Indians and freed Africans, thereby pre-empting any threat of a unified African-Indian front.

While there is inherent power in solidarity, this extends only as far as it does not compromise the unique interests of each group. In the case of colonial Trinidad and Guyana, both Africans and Indians may have benefitted from lobbying collectively for fairer labour laws. However, despite both groups being oppressed under British rule, the African and Indian experience under this repressive rule diverged greatly. Using a single term to describe this oppression would unjustly conflate the experience of both groups and promote a false sense of historical unity.

Similarly, using the term BAME when describing the nuances of contemporary societal injustices, would be as futile as trying to use this umbrella term to understand the diverse historical reality of oppressed groups in colonial Trinidad and Guyana.

Furthermore, the term BAME explicitly singles out two groups: black and Asian. Yet delineating a rigid separation between these two groups implies that ethnic identities are mutually-exclusive. In reality, according to the CIA World Factbook, around 20% of Guyanese and 23% of Trinidadians today identify as ‘mixed race’ to some degree. Umbrella terms with specific delineations, therefore, run the risk both being too ambiguous and too specific to represent the true intersectional nature of identity.

Viewing racial oppression in colonial Trinidad and Guyana through a BAME lens exemplifies how superficial terms often lead to a superficial understanding of reality. The contemporary use of the term in the UK equally conflates the unique experience of each group it is meant to represent, which undermines its overall utility as an accurate descriptor. While there is space in the English vernacular for certain umbrella terms, BAME attempts to balance the intersection between generalisation and specificity, but ultimately fails at both.

Christopher Lindrud is the International Coordinator at the Trade Center of the Americas.

The #YouClapForMeNow campaign emerged following a video in which key workers from immigrant backgrounds recited a poem, targeting an audience who demonstrate anti-immigrant sentiments. A hashtag using the poem’s title has now come to symbolise a powerful online wave, which is thanking the ethnically diverse community of key workers. With the streets of Britain filled with clapping every Thursday evening to celebrate the efforts of a multicultural NHS, this video urged those clapping to not forget this nationwide diversity in a post-coronavirus Britain.

The poem in the video aims to break down identity-based divides and appreciate immigrant workers. Nevertheless, the importance given to solidarity is convoluted by the repeated reference to antagonising differences. Constructed around the binary of ‘you’ and ‘me’, a hashtag for solidarity became one bound up in a separating logic, exacerbating the issue of ethnic differentiation. Yet perhaps it is this awareness of systemic, racial segregation that gives the poem its power. By consciously critiquing a historically divisive rhetoric, it demands an acknowledgement and re-articulation of anti-immigrant sentiments, hinting towards an inclusive future beyond reductive identity-based divides.

A multicultural society must recognise ethnic minorities’ contributions towards collective, socio-economic progress. In the recently published Research and Development Roadmap Policy paper, Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Alok Sharma writes that “we want to send a powerful signal to talented people around the world: come to the UK, be part of this exciting new future”. Society must recognise that this ‘future’ relies upon diverse talent.

With visa regulations favouring ‘skilled’ workers and graduate routes favouring those attaining higher education, many ethnic minorities – especially key workers – are slipping through the net. In spite of the increasing demand for workers, ethnically diverse workers who might not technically qualify as high-skilled are notably underrepresented. For the UK to truly build a brighter future for all, society must move to displace the deep-rooted perception that ethnic minorities are taking jobs, and instead value their present resilience and courage. Yet, as we remember the efforts of immigrant workers in a post-COVID-19 society, these efforts should not constitute their place in a UK allegedly ‘for all’; a place where inclusivity must not be contingent on tangible contributions.

Frequent circulations of the phrase ‘COVID-19 doesn’t discriminate’ has perhaps only exposed and exacerbated the societal structures that do. As the global crisis intensified, the conversation shifted to its disproportionate impact on certain domestic demographics. Belly Mujinga, a key worker for TfL, suffered a racially motivated attack when she was spat on by a man claiming to have COVID-19. A few days later, Mujinga tested positive, dying after two weeks. In spite of her respiratory problems, she was expected to resume work on the concourse as usual, where she was not supplied with personal protective equipment (PPE). Alongside the attack, Mujinga’s deprivation of PPE reflects the systemic, discriminatory treatment of many ethnic minority workers. her death represents the ultimate outcome of a societal injustice where socio-economic structures are both a causal and enabling factor.

As racial prejudices often impact the quality of life of individuals and communities, we must be able to trace the racially divisive foundations on which these are built. To envision a post-COVID-19 UK that intrinsically appreciates and celebrates ethnic diversity, policy makers must deconstruct the umbrella of racism when examining the correlation of socio-economic divides with ethnicity. We know that 63% of healthcare workers who died due to COVID-19 were from a BAME background, prompting researchers to investigate why ethnic minorities are overwhelmingly vulnerable. As Judith Butler has asserted, “the virus alone does not discriminate, but we humans surely do”.

Socio-economic inequality has isolated minorities in their particular battles with the pandemic. Due to existing social and economic factors, COVID-19 is worsening inequality in a society already laced with, and built upon, structures that discriminate. Amidst a pandemic encouraging an increasingly global consciousness, society and governing structures must assume this mindset in the UK as well. To normalise diversity, we must act upon the reality of racial disparities exposed by COVID-19, epitomised by the binary of ‘you’ and ‘me’; a binary that reflects the prevailing treatment of ethnic minorities. A future that is able to break-down identity divides must celebrate the claps that are fuelling national efforts to investigate ethnic inequality, proposing a future consciousness that seeks to overcome racial divisions and is built on present hopes for a more inclusive society.

Mahi Shah studies German and Spanish at the University of Cambridge.

Thirty years after the ‘cricket test’ was first proposed by Norman Tebbit as a way of assessing ones allegiance to a country, political rhetoric in the UK and the US still questions who truly belongs in the country.

In 1990 the politician Norman Tebbit controversially developed a method for determining how loyal British Asians and Caribbeans, as well as their children, were to England. It became known as the ‘cricket test’. It asks which team a person supports in a cricket match between England and the country of their heritage (generally where their parents or grandparents are from). The outcome of the test, according to Tebbit, is that the person who supports their heritage country over England has not fully integrated into British society and rejects crucial aspects of British culture. He said, “a large proportion of Britain’s Asian population fail to pass the cricket test. Which side do they cheer for? It’s an interesting test. Are you still harking back to where you came from or where you are?”.

This is only one example; many policymakers in the US and the UK continue to question the allegiance and identity of people in their country. This rhetoric has the power to shape perceptions towards ones citizenship, particularly for those in the first and second generation, including myself.

This was captured during the 2008 presidential campaign in the US. There were accusations that candidate Barack Obama was not American enough to lead the US. Although Obama went on to become the first African-American President of America, the controversy raised important questions around how much minorities are considered to “belong” in the US.

For several decades, America has been known as a ‘nation of immigrants’. Given this, it is curious to claim some people are not American enough if they have a minority background.

Trump brought this claim up during his own presidential campaign and again in mid-2019 when he said that four US Democratic Congresswomen should “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came,” adding that they “can’t leave fast enough”. It is notable that three of these Congresswomen – Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna Pressley – are US-born and Ilhan Omar came to America when she was a child. It is doubtful that they would have received such comments if they were not of minority origin; their minority background meant that they were not perceived to be truly American. The comments were subsequently condemned as racist by many commentators.

The reaction of UK policymakers was worrying. During the UK Conservative Party’s leadership election this year, Jeremy Hunt said Trump’s comments were “totally offensive”, and Boris Johnson replied saying they were “unacceptable”. it is notable, however, that whilst many other commentators condemned the remarks as racist, neither of the Prime Minister candidates did so, possibly as a means of protecting UK-US relations for the future. A short while after, Nigel Farage added that the comments were “genius”.

Those in power have the ability to shape which comments and narratives are legitimised and acceptable in personal conversation and on the international stage. If political leaders make and condone these remarks across nations, it sets the tone for which rhetoric is acceptable in wider society. Without fully condemning and rejecting this rhetoric, it is normalised, leaving people as vulnerable targets to these comments in everyday conversation.

This is crucial when many people of migrant descent have heard similar words themselves in private conversation. Seeing these comments in the media can evoke fear over their belonging and it can bring back foul memories for those who have heard these comments before. Indeed, when the New York Times asked readers to share their tales of being told to ‘go back’, 16,000 people in America alone responded sharing their stories of being made to feel unwelcome in their country of birth or naturalisation. It only takes a quick search online or a chat with colleagues to find these shared stories across the UK and in the US.

If political leaders have a relatively fixed idea of what it means to be a native, then this raises questions about belonging for those whose identity transcends this fixed idea. Leaders have the power to shape how inclusive national communities are, on the international stage and in the private sphere, using their rhetoric. Toxic rhetoric, such as the examples outlined, incite fear and hatred, often with traumatising long-term impacts on those who receive the remarks. Political leaders have the power to incite inclusivity and stronger communities, but for that, the rhetoric must change, and it starts with how our leaders set the tone.

Preeti Pasricha is co-Head of Agora’s Democracy & Governance Programme.

The macro-economic policies underlying globalisation exacerbate female inequality. The ‘hegemonic masculinity’ of global capitalism and corporate non-responsibility have informalised and exploited female labour. Moreover, gendered migrant labour reproduces a gendered and racialised order, which disadvantages women.

Whilst I consider ‘women’ as individuals with a configuration of intersecting identities, rather than a monolith, I believe that globalisation is bad for women overall, on either side of the North/South divide, and particularly those from ethnic minorities and lower socio-economic spheres. In order to explore this issue further, I employ Peterson’s dual understanding of globalisation as both a continuation of the ‘capitalist racialised patriarchy’ that characterises modernity and a new conjecture constituted by neo-liberal policies since the 1970s.

The concept of feminisation is important for understanding the uneven effects of globalisation on men and women. The devalorisation of the feminine, and all things considered so, produces processes of exploitation and violence against feminised concepts. Globalisation and the pursuit of profit has resulted in the ‘feminisation of employment’ with respect to the increased number of women in work and the deterioration of labour conditions, income and employment status. This has resulted in the overall degradation of women’s work as subjective, voluntary, unskilled and poorly paid or not paid at all.

Transnational competition has forced domestic capitalists to cut labour costs in order to increase productivity, with multinational corporations relocating production to the global South in search of cheaper wages. In the global North, women of colour are disproportionately impoverished by the relocation of well-paid jobs due to a legacy of racialised gender inequality. A rise in ‘McJobs’, or low-paid positions lacking in benefits, and reductions in minimum wage are the result of this repositioning. In the global South, poor working-class women fulfil the low-wage labour demands of multinational corporations that establish production in areas with weak labour laws. Globally, labour has become increasingly ‘flexible’ with the expansion of informal sectors, temporary and self-employment or a ‘feminisation’ of labour.

Capitalist workplaces are built around hidden assumptions of a separation of reproduction and production. Neo-liberal capitalism is characterised by a division between the masculinised and productive ‘monetary’ economy and the feminised and reproductive ‘non-monetary’ economy. The process of capital accumulation renders reproductive survival needs invisible, assuming informal economic activity to be in unlimited supply. Consequently, women are subordinated in both spheres, being responsible for reproductive labour in the ‘private’ sphere and holding a marginalised position in the productive economy.

Although women have increasingly participated in the labour market since the 1970s, this period has seen a deterioration of the material conditions of life for poorer women globally, as a result of macro-economic policies of privatisation, deregulation and structural adjustment. The flexibilisation of labour has seen the creation of feminised jobs that are temporary, part-time, and precarious. Cutbacks in social welfare have increased poverty for women, who are more reliant on social programs due to their burden of caring. In the global North, ethnic minorities and the working class have suffered from reduced public spending – in Britain, 86% of the burden of austerity since 2010 has fallen on women. In the global South, cuts to public health have seen increases in maternal mortality and school dropout rates for girls.

Structural adjustment programs (SAP) imposed on the global South as a form of international debt repayment by International Financial Institutions such as the IMF and World Bank, have forced women to take up additional productive and reproductive labour to survive austerity. Higher prices, reductions in government food subsidies and the devaluation of local currencies have disproportionately affected urban-poor and working-class women and disrupted the education of young girls. In Nicaragua, for instance, macro-economic gains achieved by a SAP, including a drop in inflation and increase in exports, also caused a rise in infant and maternal mortality, malnutrition, poverty and unemployment.

Neo-liberal capitalism’s neglect of the reproductive economy has prompted a commodification of the immigrant labour of Southern women. This ‘maid-trade’ – the employment of immigrant women from the global South to fulfil the domestic needs of the global North – has become a resource, upon which the centres of transnational business in ‘global cities’ depend. Immigrant labour, which frees Western women from their domestic ‘duties’, also exempts men from domestic responsibilities and relieves states’ pressure to support the reproductive economy, instead exploiting the racialised inequality of Southern women. Although foreign domestic work can be an important source of remittances for Southern countries, immigrant workers are particularly vulnerable to employer intimidation and abuse. In Britain, the domestic workers of wealthy Gulf families have faced conditions of slavery and trafficking. The Modern Slavery Act 2015 was introduced to protect migrant workers from exploitative employers, however the UK government’s measures to date have failed to significantly reduce levels of abuse.

To conclude, the ‘hegemonic masculinity’ of neo-liberal capitalism, rooted in the ‘racialised patriarchy’ of colonialism, reproduces female inequality in its neglect of the non-monetary economy and feminisation of women’s labour. Prioritising profit over reproductive needs and rendering domestic work invisible, marginalises women in the global North and South as they are simultaneously devalued in the productive economy and carry the burden of reproductive labour and caring.

Isla Wilson is active in the field of gender equality, and holds a Masters degree in International Relations.

Following the poisoning of Sergei and Julia Skripal, the UK has crystallised its identity as opposed to Russia. However, this position may be undermined by the growing cleavages in European politics, and the UK’s inability to shape EU policy in the future.

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office is expected to face unpredictable changes upon Britain’s departure from the European Union. The UK is considered to be more powerful as a member of a collective of European democracies with largely similar values and interests. While the UK will most likely retain a strong relationship with the EU in terms of defence and security cooperation, it could also lose the ability to amplify its interests from within the EU. Having derived a significant part of its international identity from EU membership, the UK could appear politically weaker and more isolated to foreign actors as a result of an inadequate representation. Present ongoing tensions suggest that Russia is a growing area of concern.

Historically speaking, with the exception of a brief rapprochement between Blair and Putin, British relations with post-Soviet Russia have been fraught with crisis and mistrust. According to the Russian narrative, NATO’s neo-imperialist expansion into the post-Soviet space is unjustified and poses a threat to Russian sovereignty. This specific narrative has been used to justify Russian military interventions in Georgia, Ukraine and, more recently, in Syria. In contrast, the British narrative holds that the Kremlin has continually and calculatedly violated international law in relation to its role in the assassination of Alexander Litvinenko on British soil, the illegal annexation of Crimea, its war crimes in Syria, the maintenance of an unlawful military presence in Ukraine, and recent allegations over disinformation campaigns and cyber-attacks. These tensions have led to the re-emergence of Cold War rhetoric and a rejection of the Kremlin’s Russian unlawfulness has become an important factor shaping Britain’s foreign policy.

After the annexation of Crimea in 2014, the EU member states multilaterally imposed economic and diplomatic sanctions on Russia. As an EU member state, the UK, alongside the Baltic States, Poland and Denmark, successfully lobbied for the continuation of these anti-Russian sanctions. However, in recent years Russia has exploited cleavages in European politics fomented by the migration crisis and gained support amongst neo-nationalist parties in the EU. In Austria, Hungary and Italy these parties have acceded to power and are calling for an end to anti-Russian sanctions. At the same time, more influential states in the EU – France, Germany and the Netherlands – are currently opposed to escalating tensions, largely due to their productive energy deals with Russia. From the British perspective, the annulment of the multilateral sanctions would undermine the sanctity of international law and leave Britain isolated as other EU member states benefit from closer trade deals with Russia. Brexit has strengthened the resolve of those calling for a revision of the economic and diplomatic penalties, weakening the UK’s foreign policy position.

Given these tensions, the poisoning of Sergei and Julia Skripal on British sovereign soil was acutely politically charged. Although the Kremlin denies any involvement, British intelligence services, which were corroborated by the European Council and the US security services, concluded that it was a Russian initiative. In response, the UK expelled 23 Russian diplomats – the largest-scale diplomatic ejection since 1985. Significantly, by pleading its case in Brussels, the UK managed to corral 18 out of 28 EU member states into expelling their own Russian diplomats. What does this reaction tell us?

The immediate British response was mild; the expulsion of diplomats was a measure used in 2006 following Litvinenko’s murder and clearly did not work as a deterrent. However, recently British MPs have backed the introduction of a British version of the Magnitsky Act, an effective measure which directly targets Putin’s inner circle of kleptocrats in ‘Londongrad’ by freezing their assets and refusing them visas. This legislation sends a clear message that Britain rejects the human rights violations of the incumbent Kremlin regime. However, the show of European solidarity was nominal – approximately 2 diplomats were expelled by each of the 18 EU member states. This shows the reticence of EU states to seriously confront Russia’s contraventions of international law and the growing fissures in European politics are a concern for post-Brexit Britain.

The British response to the Salisbury poisoning further crystallised the UK’s identity as opposed to Russia, but it remains to be seen if this position will be supported. Unanimity on the continuation of sanctions will be the true litmus test of European solidarity against the gross human rights violations of the Kremlin regime.

Angus McWhirter is studying at UCL for a MA in Politics, Security and Russian.