Young women ‘bore brunt of pandemic economic impact’, youth unemployment conference hears

Young women bore the brunt of the economic impact of the Covid-19 pandemic but disadvantaged children, particularly younger ones who lost out on learning time in school, are set to pay a greater price in the long-run in terms of their work and earnings potential, a youth employment conference has heard.

Massilimiano Mascherini, of the EU research organisation Eurofound, said that while young women were the cohort worst affected by the economic effects of the pandemic, employment levels among young people were generally back to pre-Covid levels.

The more long-term challenge, he told a conference in Dublin, remains providing assistance to young children whose educational and social development was adversely impacted by the restrictions, especially those from families that lacked the technological or other resources to help them engage with the outside world during lockdowns.

“Young women took the brunt of the crisis, they were affected the most because they worked more in places that closed during the pandemic and also because of the family responsibilities they had to take on when schools closed,” he said.

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“But what we have seen is that with employment we are back to where we were before Covid, maybe not fully in terms of hours worked, but in terms of levels of participation.”

The larger concern, he added, was the impact on children whose schools had closed during pandemic as a result of inadequate supports being provided to assist with addressing the amount of learning lost.

“There is a study in the United States that has shown the impact of the closure of school on the future prospects of the employability of young people, the future earnings and the future educational career.

“It revealed the closure of schools penalised young people in terms of their educational career and is amplifying existing human capital inequalities.

“The people affected range (at the time of the school closures) from the age of five to young people aged 17. Of course, the factor is stronger on the very young because they were learning the basics, to write and make simple math and a disrupted educational pattern at that age may have bigger implications later in life.”

Prof Emer Smyth of the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI), which hosted the event organised by the Cowork4Youth project, said that while the scale of the impact on the mental health of young people of school and other closures during the pandemic is still being assessed, it was clear that it was “very significant”.

Similarly, she said, the evidence on educational outcomes would take some time to compile but, she said “in talking to school principals and teachers anecdotally, because we don’t have the systematic data yet, they report very significant loss, very significant disruption of key skills”.

“We saw that the Department of Education put what they called the Class (Covid Learning and Support Scheme) programme, extra financial support for schools to kind of address learning loss, in place but it was for one year only and it was very modest in scale,” Ms Smyth said.

Asked about the potential for lasting impacts, she said it the evidence would take time it was beginning to emerge in a number of other countries and “where there has been learning loss, you’d expect that to follow”.