• Says employers not ready to use COVID-19 crisis as an opportunity to reskill workers
• Stresses need for urgent policy interventions to promote digitisation, automation
• Calls for intervention efforts to be rolled out as a strategy to promote female employment
• Points out employers’ perceptions on certain provisions of legislative framework are detrimental to women’s employment prospects

Despite having grappled with the new working patterns that companies were pushed to take up due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Sri Lanka’s formal private businesses appear to lag in the adoption of modern technology in business operations.

A new study carried out by the United Nations (UN) revealed that as in other developing countries, Sri Lanka’s formal private businesses too appear to fall back in this regard.

“Employers are not ready to make use of the COVID-19 crisis as an opportunity to reskill their workers and appropriate the full benefits of modern technological applications,” the UN said in its freshly launched report titled ‘Gender Disparities and Labour Market Challenges: The Demand for Women Workers in Sri Lanka’.

The study revealed that although certain employees from some firms worked from home during the lockdown, their limited access to IT-related systems, infrastructure, appropriate workspaces and lack of experience working from home constrained operations.

Given the reluctance to keep up with the technological trends that have emerged since the pandemic stuck the world, the UN asserted the need for public policy interventions.

Policy interventions are needed urgently to promote digitisation, automation and reskilling of workers and it must be rolled out as a strategy to promote female employment and in fact upgrade production processes.

It added that providing incentives to technologically upgrade production structures and adopt modern technological applications can be considered.

“While WFH can help bring more women into the workforce, the existing burden of unpaid care that women bear may permit only the more educated and better off who can depend on extended family and domestic help to assist with household and care work to benefit.

Even then, the impediments to working from home such as supportive infrastructure and monitoring systems need to be addressed,” the report highlighted.

The study also found that employers’ perceptions that certain provisions in the legislative framework are detrimental to women’s employment prospects are indeed negatively associated with the demand for women’s labour.

The employers’ inability to offer flexible working hours and night work, difficulties related to financing maternity benefits and the inability to provide a safe working environment constrain entities from demanding more women workers as do their skills endowments and societal attitudes about what sort of jobs are appropriate for women.
Policymakers urgently need to revise the relevant provisions in the legal framework to increase the demand for female workers, the report suggested.