The extreme gendering of COVID−19: Household tasks and division of labour satisfaction during the pandemic

Abstract

For many years, scholars have directed our attention to the gender gap in domestic labour. Even when women engage in paid employment, they nevertheless perform the majority of the household labour in most wealthy countries. At the same time, disasters and crises both expose and exacerbate existing social inequalities. In this paper, we ask: in what ways has the COVID−19 pandemic contributed to the gender gap in household labour, including childcare? How do women and men feel about this gap? Using data from the Canadian Perspectives survey series (Wave 3), conducted by Statistics Canada three months into the pandemic, our analyses consider the task distribution that made household labour intensely unequal during COVID−19, with women ten times more likely than men to say childcare fell mostly on them, for example. Yet, in nearly all of our models, women did not ubiquitously report being more dissatisfied with the division of domestic tasks within the house, nor were they more likely than men to say that the household division of labour “got worse” during COVID; however, parents did feel that it got worse. We discuss what these findings mean for women's mental health, long‐term paid labour, and interpersonal power, and raise questions about why it is we are not seeing a decrease in women's reported satisfaction with this division of labour. These findings spotlight gender inequality and the family as ongoing pillars of capitalism, and how the structural and interpersonal weathering of the pandemic comes at a particularly great expense to women.

Food and family care during the COVID-19 pandemic: A study of women’s domestic workload during the first wave in Chile

“…Additionally, research demonstrated that men also perceived an increase in their domestic workload, however, this extra work is considered a slight increase [37,38] and lower than what women do [39,40]. Some research has indicated that the pandemic could produce "regressive shifts in gender role attitudes" (p. 30) [41].…”

“…The median women's age was 36 years (IQR: [31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44]. Almost half of the women (47.5%) had completed college studies, while 2.8%had an incomplete or complete high school education.…”

“It’s Certainly Fair for Me”: Hybrid Masculinities and the Gendered Division of Labor during COVID-19

“…As critical infrastructure, like childcare centers and schools, closed because of COVIDrelated restrictions, parents were forced to simultaneously juggle increased caregiving and new homeschooling responsibilities along with their full-time careers (Collins et al 2021;Lee and Parolin 2021). Several studies document a marked increase in the gender gap in housework and childcare during the pandemic (Abromaviciute and Carian 2022;Haney and Barber 2022;Petts, Carlson, and Pepin 2021;Umamaheswar and Tan 2020). Disruptions to the social order (e.g., disruption of basic services) posed by disasters more generally tend to make gendered power relations more salient (Enarson 2012;Enarson and Scanlon 1999).…”

Responding to structural inequities: Coping strategies among immigrant women during COVID-19

“…Throughout the pandemic, immigrant populations faced additional stressors, including fear of deportation, limited access to crucial social services, such as healthcare, ineligibility for national unemployment benefits, and exclusion from government relief packages ( Wilson and Stimpson, 2020 ). The closure of schools and daycares further exacerbated gender inequalities in both paid and unpaid labor, as immigrant women took on more housework and childcare responsibilities at home ( Haney and Barber, 2022 ). Balancing family and work became increasingly challenging, given the limited employment opportunities, financial strain, growing family responsibilities, and uncertainty arising from the suspension of services related to legal status ( Trentin et al, 2023 ).…”