A pandemic?

The whole world has been affected by the pandemic. The major impacts are the collapse of the health care systems in some countries and all the lives we lost around the world, but there are also some important issues that reach other layers of the society. When we think about Norway, we see some of those issues affecting the foreign women.

Anna Dahlqvist talks about these issues in her publication “Gender equality effects of COVID-19 – Knowledge and initiatives in the Nordic Countries”, published this year by The Nordic Information on Gender (NIKK). She points out that women in general were already economically vulnerable before the pandemic, with fewer resources than men, and if you add an immigrant background, the vulnerability will increase considerably. So, with the pandemic, the foreign women were placed in an even more weak position in the labor market.   

Carolina Steuernagel, PhD Researcher at the Department of Behavioural Medicine at University of Oslo, thinks that the foreign women need to go through the learning process of the new language to be feasible for the application of job offers, and this learning period delays the process of finding a job position. For instance, Carolina explained that in Norway, having a good network is fundamental for finding a job position, and with the pandemic the foreign women lost the possibility to build a network for themselves, because the NGOs that usually connect foreign people with the society and offer capacity courses suspended these face-to-face activities due to the covid-19 restrictions. The schools were also a possible place to build this network, but with the restrictions, the contact with other parents and teachers is also suspended.

It is well known the need of the restrictions that governments must adopt in an attempt to minimize the catastrophic consequences that the pandemic can cause in the society. Considering that, it is so hard to think of possible solutions to handle this issue of foreign women living in Norway unemployed and with restricted options to change their situation. One of the major steps that the society is offering to those women is the possibility to keep doing Norwegian language courses online, so the learning process can continue. With the vaccination, we hope that the society will progressively go back to its normal functionality, and the foreign women will again have their chance to build relationships and network.

One of the challenges the NGOs in Norway have is to keep up with the situation of those women and try to give them some tools to deal with the unemployment status. Latinamerikansk forening is also with this responsibility, trying to help the Latin American women living in Norway. Find out more about our work in our webpage and social medias #OssKvinner.

Article written by Aline Grochowicz, volunteer at #WeWomen