Working from home could end the battle of the sexes
Day one of home schooling, 09:00 hours. Eldest son drops his school laptop, smashing the screen. “You have to help him!” I wail at my husband. (He does all the tech in our household.) “I can’t,” he replies implacably. “I have to get my work done.” “So do I!” I hiss back through gritted teeth, but already my feet are automatically swivelling me round in the direction of my son.
It becomes a kind of muscle memory, the division of labour between parents. Which is why, if we’re not careful, the Great Coronavirus Shutdown of 2020 could set back the cause of gender equality by decades.
Alternatively, if we do it right, it could be the crisis that finally sets women free.
For the first time in our nation’s history, mothers and fathers have been cast adrift in the same boat. All of us, except key workers, must now stay home with the kids: an experience that has hitherto been overwhelmingly female.
Men of my generation spend much more “quality time” with their children than their own fathers did: up to three hours every weekday, on average, compared with fewer than 15 minutes a day for a Seventies dad. But vanishingly few ever experience the real front line of parenting: being alone with your child day after day.
As of 2018, there were only 223,000 stay-at-home fathers in the UK. That is around 1 per cent of men of working age. By contrast, almost every woman who has a child spends at least some of her life – months, if not years – as a full-time carer.
In the early days, there are excellent reasons for this. Most newly delivered mothers want to keep their babies close – and have to, if they are breastfeeding. It is a privilege to be granted this time of intense, cocooning love with a new child.
But it is also a trap. One day you wriggle out of the chrysalis to find yourself transformed into something you never meant to be: a domestic drudge.
You might as well do the housework, since you’re at home. It’s easier for you to manage all the child-related admin, from inoculations to play dates, because all the information is stored in your head.
Meanwhile, your partner goes out to work every day, climbing the greasy pole, while you slide down it in absentia. Before long, you are trapped by household economics: your partner now earns more than you, so it makes sense for him to be the one who works full-time.
But the rules of engagement for the new corona economy have not yet been written. Millions of fathers now find themselves working (or, alas, not working) at home.
How will they respond to this new terrain? Will they, too, be half-submerged by the tide of drudgery and love, the tantrums and the tender face-strokes, the lidless felt tips and wizened apple cores and endless, endless rounds of laundry? Will they struggle to meet their deadlines because they are required to be a mouse lost in a wood for half the working day?
If so, miracles might come of it. Covid-19 has given us all – men and women – a unique opportunity to retrain our parenting muscles, distributing the load more evenly.
From this terrible crisis a new peace could emerge: the end of the battle of the sexes. follow Jemima Lewis on Twitter @gemimsy; read more at telegraph.co.uk/opinion