Women Leaders' Hangouts
Worldwide, more than 1.5 billion children are out of school. This has dramatically increased the need for childcare. Based on the existing distribution of child care duties in most families, mothers are likely to be more affected than fathers.
The COVID-19 pandemic is likely to accelerate changing social norms and expectations and this is a possible gain, in the conversation of career/life balance especially for women.
The Women Leaders’ Hangout brings this conversation to the foreground by ensuring that employers see telecommuting as an opportunity to advance gender equality in the workplace.

Even before the advent of Covid-19, digitalization and the gig economy, demographic changes and the associated care crisis, and the demand of new skills are equally important as having a major impact on the future of work. Critically and as evidenced by recent research, these trends have specific implications for gender equality and women’s empowerment.
The Hangout is looking to host webinars that point women and employers to the need of supporting equal access to education, skills development and training updates to meet the requirements of evolving labor markets.

Women hold notable job shares in sectors that are at high risk of being impacted by the COVID-19 crisis.
They are also overrepresented among health care and other frontline who are at the heart of the crisis response, and risk their safety and health.
The Hangout is committed to help employers and women employees interrogate HR policies, codes of conduct, buying practices, and workplace responses to Covid-19; creating awareness of the protections and requirements of the HR policies and code of conducts.

Global value chains are being disrupted by Covid-19. Women play a key role at every level as farmers, workers, processors, entrepre-neurs, buyers, service providers and employees. Therefore, compounded economic impacts are felt especially by women who are generally earning less, saving less, and holding insecure jobs or living close to poverty. The Hangout seeks to hosts expert led sessions that help women explore the risks and opportunities of finance and investments during and after Covid-19.

The Career Life Balance And The Implications On The Working Woman
A healthy work-life balance is a central issue for working women particularly in the context in which care roles are disproportionately left to women because of prevailing social and gender norms, as these dynamics make it harder for women to consequently achieve the life-work balance.
Research related to the subject reveals that working women experience greater difficulty than men in balancing work and family. It also asserts that women experience conflict as there is a ‘job spill’ over into the home more frequently than a ‘home spill’ over into work.
A significant proportion of working women experience difficulty in balancing work and family due to excessive work pressure, too little time for themselves, and the need to fulfill others' expectations of themselves. The majority of the working women experience job spillover into the home as they have to put in longer hours.
Younger women employees especially (50 percent between the ages of 26 and 35) have had to leave their jobs at some point due to caregiving responsibilities.

Men tend to get less sscrutiny when it comes to their work while women especially if you are younger tend to be overly supervised and this can be by both male or female bosses.
Additionally, men tend to get let off easier for transgressions compared to women especially if you are in a work environment that has a boys-club culture. They will be be buddies with their boss but this may prove hard for women who don't want to seem to cross boundaries and be accused of having affairs with male bosses.
Women with children are punished for instances where they put their children first while men are almost applauded or seen as more serious when they have a family.
Women executives in senior management roles usually have a lot more to prove compared to male counterparts which means some have had to fight to get where they are hence develop a tough outlook while men can have the luxury or appearing mellow or tough without being labelled soft or bitchy.

Power relationships between men and women are a delicate topic because not all workplaces are characterized by a level playing field.
These power relationships can pertain to different positions, such as between a male executive and a female subordinate, and they can have different sources, like an advantage in knowledge or expertise. Often though unequal power relationships are particularly evident in workplaces where men hold management or supervisory positions more often than women.

The women participants represented two demographics: young women in full time jobs who are wrestling with the idea of starting a family and weighing the cost of it on their careers and middle-aged women who left the workforce and are unsure of their reentry.
Younger women in their sharing indicated that they can get by without working if they leave the workforce and therefore rarely think in a long-term way about how this departure will affect their retirement savings or their ability to weather unpredictable financial challenges. Older women conversely shared how they often concluded the unviability of working as the returns were not worthy sacrificing time with their children. In conclusion the Speaker of the topic, Ms. Shee Kamwathi offered that many women throw in the towel and completely exit the workforce without fully exploring alternatives to the more-than-full-time corporate grind.