Past is prologue. Building a more equal future is up to us.

Well yes, it needs to be addressed, and where better to do so than here.

So the question I pose to you is: Can we leave the inequality of the pre-COVID world behind us for good?

Pick up just about any piece of research discussing the impact of Covid-19 on gender equality, and you’ll hear that we appear to be going backwards again – just when we had started making headway.

There are many reasons for this: even with the whole family working from home, women are still taking on the largest share of care and unpaid household work.

Social-distancing measures have had a large impact on industries with high female employment, in industries skewed heavily towards women at risk of job losses or reductions in working hours.

If we’re not able to get gender equality right in lockdown, then, is there hope for getting gender equality in the new – and hopefully better – normal?

This new normal must offer men and women equal opportunities to remote work; find new ways to overcome work/family tensions; and address issues such as occupational health and safety, domestic violence, and health and wellbeing – all of which have suffered during the pandemic.

Teleworking is at least partly to blame since cramped living situations have forced many people to deal with anxiety about remote working, financial pressure, increasing responsibilities such as home learning, and general anxiety about the future – all while physically contained within the confines of a home.

Even the seeming distance of remote working hasn’t been enough to extract many people from the stresses of the workplace – with many workers reporting cyberbullying continues to extend from the workplace to the home.

You don’t have to see your coworkers face-to-face, after all, to bully and harass them – and many people may find it easier because the physical distance often makes abusers more disinhibited.

In Issue 4 of the Women in Security Magazine we looked at issues such as OH&S – which has, thanks to the pandemic, been extended to workers’ own homes. This puts new expectations on employers to ensure that they build and maintain diverse, equal and harassment-free workplaces – even though so much everyday collaboration is taking place online, in private Zoom and Teams meetings where supervisors often aren’t present.

It doesn’t matter what city, state, or country you are reading this from. COVID-19 has shown us all that strong resilient leadership, and continued dialogue with all parties concerned is crucial to ensure that decisions made are inclusive – and effective.

Ensuring diversity within that leadership is equally important – although the statistics suggest that we still have a way to go on that count.

The COVID-19 task force, for example, is comprised of just 25% women and their absence from top-level decision-making positions was obvious.

Sadly, this is in line with overall trends – with women still comprising just 28% of managers and leaders. A recent review found just 20% of healthcare organisations had achieved gender parity on their boards, with men still outnumbering women in positions of influence in most organisations. Things are even worse in high-level roles, with women accounting for just 25% of Parliamentarians and 10% of heads of state.

Those decision-makers are shaping the post-COVID response in Australia and around the world – so after the pandemic, it is incumbent that they avoid falling into the old traps that perpetuated such glaring gender inequality before the pandemic.

Some businesses have already managed to break free of the shackles of inequality, while others are trying hard to do so. Yet others are, sadly, still all talk and no action.

Issues 1-3 of Women in Security Magazine have explored the reasons for this – and possible solutions for it – from many angles. As we have seen time and time again, the solutions are there for the taking, but cultural change is hard and takes time.

Thankfully, the disruption of our current situation means we all have time to consider how we can contribute to making our workplaces more welcoming, and more equal.

Think about how you can better support the women you work with or live with; to watch out for signs of domestic violence or other tragic repercussions of challenging new living situations; demand equal pay for equal work; and how you can support female-led initiatives delivering on the mission of gender equality.

Employers should consider these and other factors when revisiting workforce recruitment and retention strategies that have been dramatically altered by the pandemic. Many employees, shut out of careers they have dedicated their whole lives to, may be ripe for luring into cybersecurity – but we need to make sure we are constantly offering job retraining or “upskilling” to prepare them for applying their talents in the digitized and automated post-pandemic future.

There is little about our daily lives that the pandemic has not changed – but it is up to us to change our lives, and the lives of those around us, for the better.

Let’s stand up and choose to challenge inequality, and make it a thing of the past – if not for you, then for the future generations that are itching to escape from lockdown and look forward to a better, brighter future.

I’m going to do everything I can to support this mission. Will you join me?

#choosetochallenge