'We are losers in this crisis': research finds lockdowns reinforcing gender inequality

Life during
the coronavirus lockdown has reinforced gender inequality across Europe with
research emphasising that the economic and social consequences of the crisis
are far greater for women and threaten to push them back into traditional roles
in the home which they will struggle to shake off once it is over.
Throughout
the continent, campaign groups are warning that the burdens of the home office
and home schooling together with additional household duties and extra cooking,
has been unequally carried by women and that improvements made in their lives
by the growth in equality over the past decades are in danger of being rolled
back by the health crisis.
In Spain,
more than 170,000 people have signed a petition calling for urgent measures to
address the fact that women have been left to bear the brunt of the lockdown.
“As a result of this crisis, many women will be forced to give up ‘paid work’
in order to care for their families,” the petition notes, urging the government
to adopt measures such as legally enshrining working from home and facilitating
greater flexibility.
The petition
was launched earlier this month by Yo No Renuncio, an association that since
2015 has fought to improve work-life balance in Spain. “We had started to make
headway. Then came the lockdown,” said Laura Baena, a mother of three and one
of the founders of the group. “And all of a sudden we were pushed back into our
homes.”
In a bid to
battle one of the world’s deadliest outbreaks, Spanish officials plunged the
country into one of Europe’s strictest lockdowns in mid-March; schools were
shuttered, children banned from leaving their homes for six weeks and
non-essential workers told to work from home.
For women’s
rights campaigners, the situation set off alarm bells. Women in Spain were
already spending an average of 2.5 hours more per day on domestic tasks with
many families leaning on grandparents – one of the pandemic’s most vulnerable
groups – for help with child care as they grappled with the country’s long
working hours.
“So what
happens if grandparents are out of play, schools are closed and most mothers
need to work during school hours?” said Baena. “The absurd system that was
holding up work-family balance in Spain crumbles.”
A survey sent
out by her group in the second week of Spain’s lockdown found that 80% of the
12,600 women who responded were struggling to balance teleworking with
childcare. Around 13% said the lockdown had forced them to shoulder an even
greater share of housework and childcare than normal.
The findings
echo a study from the University of Valencia that found that, for the most
part, mothers were the ones left ensuring school-age children kept up with
online classes and homework during the lockdown, adding to women’s stress and
anxiety levels.
In recent
weeks, as Spain eases out of lockdown through a four-phase plan, there’s been
little clarity as to when most children will go back to school. “Society is
moving forward but mothers are still stuck in phase zero,” said Baena. “Right
now we have no idea what will happen in September. But we know that the bars
will be open.”
Women in
France have, say campaigners, seen their domestic workload triple since the
country locked down in March, when schools and nurseries were forced to close
and workers told to operate from home where possible.
Céline
Piques, spokesperson for the feminist organisation Osez le Féminisme, told
FranceInfo radio that women were being forced into homemaker roles she had
thought they had long since left behind. She said: “There’s a form of
regression for mothers during the lockdown. They are now having to do a triple
day.
“We already know women’s work is doubled (compared to
men’s) because they have to do their jobs, housework and parenting ... to that
they have had to add home schooling,” Piques said.
Marlène
Schiappa, secretary of state for female-male equality in the French government,
was so concerned about what she saw as a mounting social crisis, she
commissioned a study on the double “mental work” for women during the lockdown
that confirmed that 58% of the women who responded “do more housework than men”
as opposed to 21% of men. According to the poll, French women are doing an
average of two hours and 34 minutes of housework a day, compared with men, who
do 24 minutes less, while 63% of women said they made family meals, compared
with 28 per cent of men.
A study by
Germany’s leading economic research body, the DIW, has shown that more than a
quarter of women with children under 14 are spending less time on paid work
since lockdown began, compared with 16% of men, with women in particular
restructuring their paid jobs to stay at home. It has voiced its concern that
this will be to the detriment of their long-term career goals and earning
potential, as well as their pensions.
Angela
Merkel, chancellor of Germany, and Europe’s longest-serving elected female
leader, has warned against what she called a “retraditionalisation” of roles,
insisting to parliament recently she would do everything she could to halt its
creep in Germany.
“I will intervene with all my strength to ensure that a
retraditionalisation does not take place, but that instead we give women and
men the same opportunities,” she said. Always cautious about being labelled a
feminist, she added: “By the way, there are lots of men who are also occupied
with home schooling, not only mothers. But ... I’m sure if we add up all the
hours at the end of this it will be women who will have been more heavily
burdened.”
Women have
criticised that questions of how to ease up on lockdowns have focused on
economic considerations rather than childcare. “Far more effort has been made
debating when the beer gardens, the car showrooms and the Bundesliga matches
can resume, than whether kindergartens can open,” said Suzanne, a 41-year-old
accountant and mother of two from Hamburg.
In Ireland,
where social and economic changes of recent decades have transformed the lives
of many women, research carried out for the Irish legislature, the Oireachtas,
has concluded that women have less time to carry out paid work from home
compared with men due to the closure of schools and nurseries. It concluded
that a “likely immediate consequence” of the situation was that “women’s
productivity in employment will suffer more than men’s.” Longer-term, it said
women could expect “potentially fewer economic opportunities ... and a wider
gender remuneration gap.”
The research
also noted that women in Ireland, as elsewhere, are disproportionately employed
in sectors such as retail and hospitality which have been shut down entirely,
increasing the hit on female earnings.
An
investigation by the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) into how the coronavirus
crisis impacts daily life with the concentration of work, school and leisure in
people’s homes, concluded that while all family members had generally benefited
from less time pressures, the main responsibility for organising everything
from routines to social contacts had fallen to women.
“Women seem to be doing much more than men to manage
the amalgamation of the different areas of life at home,” said Theun Pieter van
Tienoven, a sociologist at the VUB, summarising the findings of the study
drawing on the daily diaries kept by 661 Belgians. “The lockdown therefore
reinforces gender inequality in relative terms,” he added.
As lockdowns
ease across Europe, new pressures on mothers are now emerging as employers
start demanding that their workers return to their office desks, even though
schools and nurseries have returned only in part or often not at all.
“The messages I’m getting are desperate,” Baena, the
Spanish campaigner, said. “The objective right now is survival.”
Some women,
she said, have guiltily resorted to asking elderly parents to resume their
childcare duties, despite the health risks involved, while others have been
forced to leave children on their own at home. Many women had been left with
little option but to quit their jobs or take leave without pay.
“All the
advances we made in terms of equality and now so many women are going to end up
back in their homes,” she added. “We’re going to be the big losers in this
crisis.”