Women pay the price of COVID-19 more than men

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Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic is an unprecedented event with wide-ranging implications. Given that households are at the center of major changes affecting the entire world, the Review of Economics of the Household is publishing a series of issues on COVID-19 and the economics of the household. Here we review eight articles documenting the enormous costs of the COVID containment policies, in particular the school closures that ensued. Individuals paid a heavy cost in terms of disruption in their attachment to the labor force. Children could not go to school and parents were forced to provide extra childcare and spend significant amounts of time helping children continue to learn, while possibly working from home. Domestic violence became more common. These changes have often been traumatic, to the detriment of the well-being and mental health of large numbers of people. Women have paid a higher price than men, as many of the studies demonstrate. Our conclusion calls for policy-makers to prepare for the post-traumatic period: many households will need help.

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Women’s and men’s work, housework and childcare, before and during COVID-19

Daniela Del Boca, Noemi Oggero, Paola Profeta … (2020)

Evidence from past economic crises indicates that recessions often affect men’s and women’s employment differently, with a greater impact on male-dominated sectors. The current COVID-19 crisis presents novel characteristics that have affected economic, health and social phenomena over wide swaths of the economy. Social distancing measures to combat the spread of the virus, such as working from home and school closures, have placed an additional tremendous burden on families. Using new survey data collected in April 2020 from a representative sample of Italian women, we analyse the effects of working arrangements due to COVID-19 on housework, childcare and home schooling among couples where both partners work. Our results show that most of the additional housework and childcare associated to COVID-19 falls on women while childcare activities are more equally shared within the couple than housework activities. According to our empirical estimates, changes to the amount of housework done by women during the emergency do not seem to depend on their partners’ working arrangements. With the exception of those continuing to work at their usual place of work, all of the women surveyed spend more time on housework than before. In contrast, the amount of time men devote to housework does depend on their partners’ working arrangements: men whose partners continue to work at their usual workplace spend more time on housework than before. The link between time devoted to childcare and working arrangements is more symmetric, with higher percentages of both women and men spending less time with their children if they continue to work away from home. For home schooling, too, parents who continue to go to their usual workplace after the lockdown are less likely to spend greater amounts of time with their children than before. Similar results emerge for the partners of women not working before the emergency. Finally, analysis of work–life balance satisfaction shows that working women with children aged 0–5 are those who find balancing work and family more difficult during COVID-19. The work–life balance is especially difficult to achieve for those with partners who continue to work outside the home during the emergency.

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Estimating the immediate impact of the COVID-19 shock on parental attachment to the labor market and the double bind of mothers

Misty Heggeness (2020)

I examine the impact of the COVID-19 shock on parents’ labor supply during the initial stages of the pandemic. Using difference-in-difference estimation and monthly panel data from the Current Population Survey (CPS), I compare labor market attachment, non-work activity, hours worked, and earnings and wages of those in areas with early school closures and stay-in-place orders with those in areas with delayed or no pandemic closures. While there was no immediate impact on detachment or unemployment, mothers with jobs in early closure states were 68.8 percent more likely than mothers in late closure states to have a job but not be working as a result of early shutdowns. There was no effect on working fathers or working women without school age children. Mothers who continued working increased their work hours relative to comparable fathers; this effect, however, appears entirely driven by a reduction in fathers’ hours worked. Overall, the pandemic appears to have induced a unique immediate juggling act for working parents of school age children. Mothers took a week of leave from formal work; fathers working fulltime, for example, reduced their hours worked by 0.53 hours over the week. While experiences were different for mothers and fathers, each are vulnerable to scarring and stunted opportunities for career growth and advancement due to the pandemic.

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Women at the Core of the Fight against Covid-19 Crisis

(2020)

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Author and article information

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Enrica Croda: enrica.croda@unive.it

Journal

Journal ID (nlm-ta): Rev Econ Househ

Journal ID (iso-abbrev): Rev Econ Househ

Title: Review of Economics of the Household

Publisher: Springer US (New York )

ISSN (Print): 1569-5239

ISSN (Electronic): 1573-7152

Publication date (Electronic): 15 February 2021

Pages: 1-9

Affiliations

[1 ]GRID grid.7240.1, ISNI 0000 0004 1763 0578, Department of Economics, , Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, ; 30121 Venice, Italy

[2 ]GRID grid.263081.e, ISNI 0000 0001 0790 1491, Department of Economics, , San Diego State University, ; San Diego, CA 92182 USA

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Publisher ID: 9549

DOI: 10.1007/s11150-021-09549-8

PMC ID: 7883943

PubMed ID: 33613141

SO-VID: 65189b0f-9073-4baf-92e6-6a7713fc1b6b

License:

This article is made available via the PMC Open Access Subset for unrestricted research re-use and secondary analysis in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for the duration of the World Health Organization (WHO) declaration of COVID-19 as a global pandemic.

Women pay the price of COVID-19 more than men

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Novel Coronavirus Disease COVID-19

Most cited references 3

Women’s and men’s work, housework and childcare, before and during COVID-19

Estimating the immediate impact of the COVID-19 shock on parental attachment to the labor market and the double bind of mothers

Women at the Core of the Fight against Covid-19 Crisis

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