Women are bearing the brunt of the lockdown

Gauri, a lawyer in Mumbai, is grappling with a new problem — how to squeeze 25 hours into a day that already doesn’t have enough hours.

With a nationwide lockdown, her maid who helps with the housework has been unable to come to work. Her parents, who live separately, face a similar situation. And it is now Gauri’s job to juggle the two houses as she cooks, cleans, does the laundry, procures groceries, and takes care of an energetic child whose school remains shut. And, since she’s working from home, she’s also reading legal briefs on the side.

“In the last few weeks it has become increasingly difficult to run the home,” says Mahesh Vyas, managing director and CEO, Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy. “And it is women who are taking the hit.”

An ongoing study by researchers at Northwestern University, the University of Mannheim, Germany, and the University of California, San Diego, finds that women are bearing a disproportionate economic burden of the coronavirus disease.

The study looks at the American market but many of its findings are applicable to India. Housework, for instance, in both countries remains primarily a woman’s responsibility. But the gap in unpaid care work in India is wide. So, women who can afford it and have paid jobs in the formal sector rely on an army of relatively cheap labour in the informal sector — cooks, nannies and cleaners, many of them women themselves.

Now, with families under lockdown and social distancing showing no sign of abating any time soon, both sets of women, in the formal and informal sector, risk losing jobs.

This is grim news for a country that already has among the lowest female labour workforce participation rates in South Asia. Women continue to drop out of paid work largely due to social norms about “appropriate” work for women, and the cultural idea that housework and childcare are a woman’s job.

Given the scale of the pandemic and the multiple crises from migration to racism, the gender angle has been muted. There is talk among women’s groups of a spike in domestic violence but there is no data available yet.

“We are asking bystanders and neighbours to be alert to domestic violence,” says Sohini Bhattacharya of Breakthrough India. “We are also asking men to step up to share the domestic burden.”

Certainly, it’s too early to say how (and if) men are stepping up at home. But if men take on even a fraction of housework, it could lead to longer-term behavioural change — and a significant freeing up of women’s time that could enable their greater participation in the job market.

The silver lining in the Covid-19 shock would be this disruption of India’s business-as-usual labour market. “In the longterm, when companies realise how beneficial work from home is, the biggest beneficiaries would be women,” says Vyas.

Namita Bhandare writes on gender The views expressed are personal