
Professor Daniela Casale
African Fellow, December 2023 - February 2024
Home Institution: University of the Witwatersrand
Daniela Casale is a Professor in the School of Economics and Finance at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. Daniela is a development economist with over twenty years’ experience in the field of feminist economics specifically. Other cross-cutting areas of study include labour, household, health, wellbeing and education economics. She has published widely across a range of economics, development studies, and public health journals, among them, Feminist Economics, Economic Development and Cultural Change, Economics and Human Biology, Journal of Development Studies, Public Health Nutrition and PLOS ONE. She is on the editorial board of Development Southern Africa and President of the Economics Society of South Africa. Her two main current research projects include examining gender wealth gaps in South Africa, and investigating the ongoing impact of the Covid-19 crisis on women’s labour market outcomes in South Africa.
Project Title: The gendered impact of the Covid-19 crisis in the labour market and the home in South Africa – taking a longer-term view
There is now substantial global evidence to suggest that women were disproportionately affected by the Covid-19 crisis and associated lockdowns. Studies from a range of countries, including South Africa, have shown that women were more likely than men to lose their jobs or to work fewer hours during the first wave of lockdowns, and that they took on more of the additional unpaid care work following school closures (Adams-Prassl et al 2020; Andrew et al 2020; Casale and Posel 2021; Casale and Shepherd 2022; Collins et al 2021; Deshpande 2020; Ilkkaracan & Memis 2021; Kristal and Yaish 2020; Sevilla & Smith 2020). There has been much less work tracking whether subsequently there has been a full recovery for women relative to men or whether, instead, gender inequality has deepened since the crisis. A few studies suggest the latter, namely that women’s employment has generally been slower to recover to pre-Covid levels than men’s, with lasting implications for women’s wellbeing and that of their households (Casale and Shepherd 2022; ILO 2021; IWPR 2020; 2021). In this study, I will use the South African quarterly labour market surveys to track women’s performance in the labour market relative to men’s over a longer post-crisis period as well as to explore the nature and quality of that work. Given the South African context, a key objective will be to explore how the intersections of gender, race, location, family structure and class have mediated women’s experiences during Covid.