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Focus on social challenges
The COVID-19 pandemic and ensuing crisis exacerbated deep-seated social inequalities within our societies. Women, low-income households, children and young people, as well as low-skilled, part-time, temporary and self-employed workers, have all been disproportionally affected.
Today, Russia's war of aggression in Ukraine is creating a major humanitarian crisis affecting millions of people and a severe economic shock of uncertain duration and magnitude, imperiling the world's recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic.
Shining the light on gender-based violence
Gender-based violence was aptly labelled the “hidden pandemic” at the height of COVID-19, when many women were trapped at home with their abusers. Yet heightened public discourse and the transition to a post-COVID “normal” have done little to improve outcomes for victims/survivors.
The majority of OECD governments have identified violence against women as the top gender-equality challenge facing their country. Worldwide, around 30% of all women aged 15 and older report having experienced some form of it at least once in their lifetime.
Gender-based violence can take many forms, the most common and lethal of which is intimate-partner violence. Around 34% of female victims of intentional homicide are killed by a current or former partner globally. Pre-pandemic, this equated to around 82 women or girls being murdered by their intimate partner, every day, around the world.
Governments must adopt a whole-of-state approach to gender equality generally and gender-based violence specifically. This means ensuring reliable, adequate, and well-organised funding for co-ordinated services. It also requires policy coherence across agencies and levels of government so that policies reinforce each other.
The burden of unpaid work
The OECD Risks that Matter 2020 survey showed that when schools and childcare facilities closed during the COVID-19 pandemic, mothers took on the brunt of the additional unpaid work – and experienced labour market penalties and stress.
The unequal burden of family responsibilities, combined with the lack of affordable early-childhood education and care options, means that many mothers work part time and miss out on career advancement and wage growth, or stay out of the labour market entirely.
The introduction of teleworking had the potential to support women’s labour market attachment; yet the use of telework by men and women reflects prevailing gender norms and managerial cultures that do not necessarily work to the advantage of women.
Closing gaps in labour force participation and working hours may result in an average 9.2% boost to GDP across OECD countries by 2060, adding about 0.23 percentage points to average annual growth.
A skewed AI landscape
Neither AI users nor AI workers are evenly distributed across populations and sectors. AI users are more likely to be younger, male and more educated. Female professionals are less than half as likely as male professionals to have AI skills, and young men are more than twice as likely as young women to be able to programme.
AI systems reflect the data available, developers' modelling choices, and the institutions where they are implemented. Today, most cutting-edge AI companies are led by men. The effects of generative AI and robotics on women’s economic and social equality remain to be seen. As they advance however, these tools will need appropriate guardrails to avoid gendered mis- and disinformation.
AI can be a double-edged sword if these issues are not adequately addressed. Policymakers should ensure AI is used to support — not harm — women's economic empowerment by focusing on digital skills, supporting women in AI research, and ensuring harmful gender stereotypes and biases are kept in check.
Disrupted cancer care in Europe
In Europe, as in the rest of the world, the pandemic had a major impact on the provision of primary care, cancer screening and treatment, care continuity for people with chronic conditions, and elective surgery
Although cancer care typically focuses on early detection and treatment, the number of hospital stays for cancer care in 2020 dropped by 11.5% on average compared to 2019 in all EU countries for which 2020 data are available.
Screening rates for breast and cervical cancer also fell by 6% on average in EU countries in 2020. As a result, many patients were diagnosed at more advanced stages, complicating their treatment and reducing their chances of survival.
The pandemic exposed weaknesses in European health systems, created by years of underfunding across the board. Long-term care systems, fragmented data infrastructure and limited spare workforce capacity featured among the lacking critical resources.
Healthy online content
While the expansion of information and communication spaces has heightened citizen engagement, concerns over the proliferation of mis- and disinformation, and the risks posed by artificial intelligence (AI) and online discrimination, are at an all-time high since the COVID-19 pandemic.
Governments are enacting various measures to tackle online harm, but mitigating risks requires new governance models that encourage the flow of factual information and protect people from the unchecked spread of hateful or illegal content –while also preserving users’ freedom of expression.
The 2020 OECD Survey on Open Government finds that protection against discrimination on the basis of ethnicity, gender, sex and sexual orientation is well established in OECD countries.
In addition to a wide range of government-led initiatives, 94% of OECD respondents have legislation protecting people from hate speech and 78% criminalise it. Government initiatives to tackle online mis- and disinformation initiatives include developing content moderation policies, enhancing digital literacy, and ensuring more transparency on – and accountability from – the creators and spreaders of untruths.
Addressing the pandemic's impacts on young people
Between 2019 and 2020, most countries saw an increase in the share of 18–24-year-olds not in employment, education or training (NEET), from 14.6% to 15.3%, across Europe and the Americas.
Despite some improvement in 2021, experiences following the 2008 financial crisis indicate a five-year lag time before the effect of economic disruptions is felt by this group: the share of NEET youth peaked in 2013.
Furthermore, 2021 OECD data indicate that 25–29-year-olds who had left school prior to attaining an upper secondary qualification were twice as likely to be NEET as those with an upper secondary qualification.
As disruptions and evolutions continue in 2023, countries should seek to provide measures to support labour market inclusion for young people facing major or multiple employment obstacles, and work with education systems to give young people greater ownership over what, how, where and when they learn.
Disrupted learning
In 2020, 1.5 billion students in 188 countries and economies were locked out of their schools due to the COVID-19 pandemic. As vaccines became widely available over the course of 2021, many schools re-opened, even if some disruptions to learning continued.
The impact on students has been severe. National studies to evaluate the impact of school closures on learning outcomes were undertaken in more than half of the countries with available data, covering learning losses in both reading and mathematics, and to a lesser extent, science.
Evaluations have also gone beyond the impact on learning: nearly all countries have also looked at the impact on the mental health and well-being of students.
However, only half of countries have studied the impact on non-cognitive skills, which may have been significantly affected by the long periods of social isolation. Understanding the learning and well-being losses due to school shutdowns will be essential if governments are to develop targeted policies.
COVID-19 and fragile contexts
Fragility is the combination of exposure to risk and insufficient coping capacities of the state, system and/or communities to manage, absorb or mitigate those risks. It occurs in a spectrum of intensity across six dimensions: economic, environmental, political, security, societal and human.
The socio-economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic led to a global reversal in human development in 2020 and saw the number of people in extreme poverty rise, while between-country inequality also increased.
The 60 fragile contexts identified this year account for 24% of the world’s population but 73% of people living in extreme poverty worldwide. Such a concentration of extreme poverty has exposed people living in fragile contexts to a range of compounding risks that affect their livelihoods and resilience.
One compounding risk in fragile contexts is a significantly lower COVID-19 vaccination rate, which led to a higher number of COVID-19 deaths and signals poorer resilience for the future.
Latest social challenges insights
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social mobility
Promoting equality of opportunity
People from disadvantaged backgrounds have fewer opportunities to climb the socio-economic ladder. What policies can make a difference and ensure economic and social prosperity for all?
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Equity in education
For a more resilient future
The first five years of life are a time of great opportunity, but also a period of great risk for children from disadvantaged households. What policy actions can help create a more level playing field for children throughout their lives?
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War in Ukraine
Tackling the policy challenges
Destroyed lives are the immediate consequences of Russia's war of aggression in Ukraine. The war also imperils the world's economic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. What insights can help us face the policy challenges ahead?
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immigrant integration
Responding to long-standing weaknesses
This policy brief provides new evidence on the impact of the pandemic on immigrant integration in terms of health, labour market outcomes and training, as OECD countries start to recover from the crisis.
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2022 Year in Review
The best podcast interviews of the year
In 2022, OECD Podcasts did not shy away from the hard issues plaguing society today. Misinformation, domestic violence and burnout are only a few of the topics discussed this year with a variety of experts.
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Inclusive recovery
Spotlight on an inclusive recovery
The crisis unleashed by COVID-19 has put a spotlight on equity challenges that existed well before the pandemic. We must prepare for an inclusive and transformative recovery together, one that puts people’s well-being at the centre.
Explore key topics and broaden your knowledge of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
Browse all related resources
From childcare and elderly support to housing and food security, this collection focuses on people and livelihoods. It pulls together OECD analysis and data spanning a multitude of issues related to social protection and inequalities, many of which are being challenged in the context of the global coronavirus (Covid-19) crisis.
