Blink and you’d have missed it - yesterday (28 January 2020) the UK Government published and withdrew a Covid-19 graphic that was widely lambasted for being sexist and gender-blind. The image comprised four panels of “home life” three of which solely featured women and girls doing housework, care work, and homeschooling, whilst the only representation of a man and boy is of them lounging on a sofa. While a laughably naive move on the part of the government, the quadtych was probably more accurate than we - or the Government - would like to admit.
We know that the COVID-19 pandemic has disproportionately impacted women when it comes to their paid and unpaid labour. Women’s unpaid domestic and care work has significantly increased and their paid work has decreased since the first lockdown in March 2020; this is true even for those women who are the main breadwinners. Over a third of working mothers interviewed for a Fawcett’s Society Survey reported having lost work or hours due to a lack of childcare during the pandemic. This figure rose to 44 percent when it came to Black, Asian and minority ethnic mothers. For working single mothers the situation is worse. Single parents make up a quarter of households with dependent children - and of this quarter, working mothers make up the majority. These working mothers face a ‘triple penalty’ of reduced income from furlough, reduced maintenance, and increased costs due to children being at home all day.
It is common during times of crisis for society to revert to the safety of traditional norms, pressing pause (and often reset) on the pesky hard work that comes with progress. It is reasonable, therefore, to draw a causal link between the pandemic and the reverting role of women. This is to obfuscate, however, the role of the care industry. Over the past years, the commodification of care has provided the opportunity for families to buy childcare and domestic services, freeing up women to take up paid and - increasingly - productive roles. Data indicates that this shift from the unpaid to the paid economy has increased equality. The pandemic, however, has shown that what we were seeing was, in fact, the discharge of women’s duty to the domestic and care industry, rather than a change to gender roles within the home. Indeed, as the pandemic removed the opportunity for families to buy in domestic and care services, underlying traditionally gendered obligations emerged rather than reverted.
Where the pandemic’s impact on women’s roles may have revealed a return to a slightly hidden default, there has been observed a shift in men’s roles that may have a more positive impact on gender dynamics in the home. An increase in men undertaking care work in the home has resulted in an observable reduction in the gender childcare gap from 30.5 to 27.2 percent. Whilst this increase in care work is more dependent on men’s employment, i.e. the men who are doing more unpaid work in the home are likely to those that have lost their job during the pandemic, evidence indicates that such increases in men’s caring roles tend to stick.
The observations of gender dynamics in the home during the pandemic provide a great illustration of what we know about changing gendered norms. It is not enough to just focus on increasing women’s access to the paid/production labour market without also working to change the normative behaviour of men.
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