Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 6:00 pm on 6 May 2020.
Thank you for raising this particular issue, Joyce. We know that COVID is having a greater impact on women economically than it is on men: 17 per cent of women working in sectors that have been shut down, compared to about 13 per cent of men. Almost two thirds of employees in the low-paying sectors are women. We've got—. Women tend to have fewer sources of wealth to fall back on when times are hard in the way that they are for many women now, and these are factors that we've understood for some time, but they've been very clearly highlighted, haven't they, by the challenge that we face. So, absolutely, one of the thrusts of the discussions that we had yesterday was about how we can address that in a post-COVID economy. The social care sector, obviously, is one that we know is under strain. The payment that the Welsh Government made last week to workers in the social care sector I think is a sort of down payment of the sort of arrangement that we want to put in place in the longer term to support workers in that sector better.
There is a real question for us at the heart of this of how we value care; the value we attach to that, and the economic value we attach to that, and I think that one of the challenges for all of us is to turn people's support for key workers, which I think many people have realised for the first time, probably, the centrality of that contribution to the well-functioning of our society, to capitalise on that, build on it, marry that with people's understanding of the different role for Government and the role of the economy in the future, and try and get a better settlement for exactly those people.