‘Hanging on a cliff’: how the pandemic pushed women to upskill online
When the pandemic struck Adisa, a 41-year-old mother of two, was already struggling financially after being made redundant from her job of three and a half years.
In lockdown, however, feelings of disappointment and fear quickly hardened into resolve. Like many women, both in the UK and worldwide, Adisa started an online course on leadership in an effort to upskill.
“The pandemic actually gave me the opportunity to look at myself,” Adisa explains. ”You are literally hanging on a cliff, so you think: what can I do with this situation?”
Female Learners
Adisa is not alone. The disruption of mass job losses has been a driving force for female learners worldwide.
It is estimated that by the end of 2021 13m fewer women will be employed globally than in 2019 while male employment is on track to rebound to pre-pandemic levels. This trend in reflected in surging numbers of online female learners.
Women accounted for 54 per cent of new registered learners in 2020, up from 45 per cent in 2019, according to data from Coursera with business and STEM courses amongst the most popular.
Female Leaders
In the UK, where women were more likely to be furloughed than male colleagues for the majority of the pandemic, 230,000 women turned to online classes in management and leadership while 190,000 enrolled in entrepreneurship in an effort to further their educations.
“When you are a woman working in the corporate environment these leadership opportunities don’t come to you,” explains Adisa, who took the course in hopes of landing a stable management role.
In the end, however, the course inspired her to focus on building up her own consultancy business, Abjel Communications, where she works full-time.
Out on a Limb
A global pandemic may not seem like the best time to start a business, with the UK economy shrinking by 10 per cent in 2020 alone, but many women chose to push ahead regardless after pursuing personal development.
A survey of 22 businesses by UENI found that a third of enterprises were founded by women in 2020, up from 17 per cent in 2019.
Jennifer Hakim, 35, the founder and CEO of the company Dare PR, lost half of her clients when the pandemic hit. She started studying science courses online which gave her the confidence to start a new business.
“I think it was really about mental health. I was finding it hard to structure my time,” explains Hakim. She found the choice to start a second business an easy one after online courses helped her to overcome feelings of inadequacy in the workplace.
“The primary effect was helping with imposter syndrome,” said Hakim, who recently launched The Spill magazine. “I feel like I have more authority and reason to be here.”
Fired up
Betty Vandenbosch, the chief content operator at Coursera, said that the data showing 11.7m women globally participated in leadership and management courses while 9.9m studied entrepreneurship during the pandemic, was encouraging.
“After the success of initiatives launched to support female entrepreneurship in the UK, it is promising to see that women in the UK are investing in skills including entrepreneurship as well as leadership and management that can help them build their own businesses,” Vandenbosch said.
Lucy Jeffrey, 26, who runs the sustainable fashion company Bare Kind, was inspired to quit her job after taking an online course in social enterprise run by Oxford University.
“It fired me back up” says Jeffrey whose business had “fizzled out” while she was working at a bank full-time.
Jeffrey, who had commuted from London to Birmingham three days a week prior to the pandemic, decided to put her all into building her business after she got a taste for home working. “From a personal point of view I felt like I could never go back to the office again,” she said.
Closing the skills gap
Online courses have been instrumental in helping women switch up their careers during a turbulent period for the global economy, even helping them enter sectors which typically lack female representation.
With women one third more likely to work in a sector that was shut down during the pandemic than men thousands turned to the male-dominated tech sector where demand for workers is at an all time high.
A total of 8.5m women globally enrolled in computer programming on Coursera while 70,000 women took courses and received mentoring through the company Women in Tech, which doubled its user base during the pandemic.
“It’s partly to do with time. People have been spending less time rushing around and have more time to explore what they are interested in,” said Jessica Alderson, UK lead for Women in Tech. “I think people have been more introspective.”
Innovation in the Pandemic
While the pandemic has been a time of stagnation and set-backs for many women’s careers a boom in online learning suggests that for others it has been a time of innovation and growth.
Looking back, Adisa sees her redundancy as a positive.
“If I was in my day job I wouldn’t have had a chance to look at consultancy,” she said. “Sometimes you have to be pushed.”
Read more: The future is female: COVID-19 fuels a surge in women entrepreneurs