For working mothers, the bad news comes as rapidly as the laundry basket refills. An international study reported that women in the UK are now spending 65 hours a week on unpaid labour; while another report revealed that mothers are 23 percent more likely than fathers to have left paid work since coronavirus struck. And it is the women who have assumed the bulk of new childcare and housework responsibilities, contributing to 10.3 hours a day of childcare compared to men’s 2.3 hours, and 1.7 hours more wiping, mopping and meal preparation.
The pandemic, of course, has wrought a grim toll across the world. Men are more likely to die of the virus, but it is women who are bearing the brunt of its social impact. With breathtaking speed, it has ripped up dual-earner couples’ fragile pact: we can both work because there is someone else to look after the kids (and maybe clean the loo).
But on March 23, when the UK went under lockdown, there was no one to look after the kids; no one to school the kids; no one to supply the tens of meals a week that Britons consumed away from home before the pandemic struck. The economy and many public services were shuttered... and women were left to pick up the slack.
‘I feel like I’ve been teleported back 60 years,’ says Becci, 38, who works in publishing and who, pre-crisis, took pride in her ‘almost egalitarian’ domestic labour arrangements with husband Luke, 40, who also works in publishing. A mother of two boys aged four and two, coronavirus forced Becci into the dismal calculus that as Luke earned more, his career took priority.
Yesterday, I was trying to catch up on emails sitting on top of the laundry basket and broke down in tears.
‘Luke’s boss was not understanding about the fact he had kids at home, and because we need him to keep his job, I have to squeeze my paid work into small gaps of time in the day. Yesterday, I was trying to catch up on emails sitting on top of the laundry basket and broke down in tears.’
Thanks in part to the gender pay gap, women are more likely to be freelance or lower paid than men, meaning their careers are often the first to be sidelined when disruptions come along. Meanwhile, an Institute for Fiscal Studies report finds that bosses whose staff are working from home have failed to factor in fathers’ care duties, enforcing a culture of male presenteeism.
However much we soft-peddle fantasies of the 1950s, when happy housewives baked pies and waved their husbands off to work with a smile, history has a hard lesson. When breadwinner and housewife models reassert themselves, physical, psychological and financial abuses against women rise. Earning power is power and freedom from a closing in of life opportunities, the claustrophobia of these four walls. Enforced domesticity is a sour cherry pie.
There was a yawning domestic labour gap before this crisis, of course. In 2016, British men put in 16 hours of unpaid work each week to women’s 26, in statistics that have gone into reverse, in terms of male contributions, since the late 90s. Now, like a spotlight on cobwebs, coronavirus has magnified existing inequalities. BAME Britons are dying from the virus in greater numbers, single parents have been plunged into poverty, and women across the world have been landed with the lioness’ share of extra housework and childcare. This is not a gauzy vision of women stepping in in a time of need with their soothing maternal love. This is the representation, in arses wiped and loos scrubbed, of structural injustices.
In April the women in the house had to down tools as we were so sick of cleaning up after the men. And they have the cheek to call themselves male feminists.
The Covid gender labour gap has also affected house-sharers such as Grace, 30, a marketing executive who shares a four-bedroom house in East London with a heterosexual couple and two single males. ‘Before Covid, the boys ate out most nights and we hired a cleaner four hours a week from communal funds to prevent rows about who did what,’ she says. ‘When the pandemic struck we lost our weekly cleaner and, overnight it seemed, any iota of civilisation. In April the women in the house had to down tools as we were so sick of cleaning up after the men. And they have the cheek to call themselves male feminists!’
But there are reasons for hope. Despite women’s dizzying double shift, men are contributing twice as many childcare hours as they were in pre-pandemic days – and this, says IFS study author Sonya Krutikova, might carry over to greater male effort when the crisis ends. A revolution in ‘blended’ home and office-working, widely predicted to be one of the products of the crisis, could help white-collar workers better balance their care demands and working lives. If, that is, feminists fight hard for a new domestic deal.
Marinading in their domestic arrangements, some men are experiencing a feminist epiphany. Adam, 35, opted to be furloughed from the company he works for to look after his five-year-old girl after hearing that his wife’s boss had furloughed his own wife to look after the couple’s kids. ‘I thought it was like something from the dark ages,’ he says. ‘Why should my wife, who works freelance, be naturally expected to take the career hit?’
‘Adam has done more cleaning around here than he has in a decade,’ his wife Sylvie, a coder, reports. ‘I’d like to think that this has given men some insight into how relentlessly exhausting women’s lives can be.’
Sally Howard is the author of The Home Stretch which is published by Atlantic Books, £14.99.
*Some names have been changed