Experts fear pandemic effect on working moms
Women's gains could be erased, says UN report
It's been a year since the spread of COVID-19 has forced us to stay at home, and while social distancing has been hard on everyone, researchers are starting to shine a light on the fact that women — specifically mothers — are bearing the brunt of the pandemic's challenges.
In addition to dealing with increased fear, economic uncertainty, isolation, sickness and even death, the burden of child care, housework and home-schooling has disproportionately fallen on mothers, says Andrea O'Reilly, a York University professor and co-author of Mothers Mothering and COVID-19. The book is set to be released later this month and contains more than 500 pages of statistics and real-life examples of pandemic-related difficulties mothers are navigating.
“It's more than a gendered pandemic,” O'Reilly said. “It's what I call Matricentric.
It's a mother-focused pandemic, as it's affecting mothers, more than women, more than fathers and more than men.”
O'Reilly found that women are struggling to keep their jobs and sources of income while dealing with rising demands of child care and domestic duties. To get a better sense of what is happening, O'Reilly and colleagues reviewed the November 2020 United Nations report Whose time to Care: Unpaid care and domestic work during COVID-19. They found women were taking on more household tasks than men during the pandemic and were more likely to leave the workforce.
“Women are leaving the workforce at alarming rates, and it will have long-lasting consequences,” said O'Reilly.
According to the UN report, there is a real danger the pandemic will erase the progress that women have made over the past decades. Looking at the unemployment rates of 55 higher and middle-income countries, the report found that more women over the age of 25 were foregoing paid work for full-time child care, and their unemployment rates from the end of 2019 to mid2020 increased from 5.5 per cent to 7.7 per cent.
Odeen Eccleston, a host from HGTV Canada series Hot Market, said the pandemic exposed just how much is required of women.
“The modern woman is not only expected to bring home the bacon, but be the primary caregivers and in some cases look after elderly parents,” she said.
Eccleston, a real estate agent and a property developer whose work was deemed essential, said working moms like herself who are also business owners had to ask themselves: “Do I work and make money? Or do I watch my kids?”
Her son's daycare closed early during the pandemic and she had to leave her toddler with her mother. “Not all moms are fortunate enough to have grandparents able to help during this time,” she said.
O'Reilly said policy-makers do not consider the struggles of mothers when making pandemic restrictions. Their struggles are overlooked unless researchers specifically set out to investigate them, she said.
One Canadian study she presents reports that during the pandemic men saw a slight increase in the amount of time they spend caregiving, from an average of 33 hours per week to 46 hours. Women, on the other hand, saw their weekly average of 68 hours rise to 95 hours.
A New York Times survey O'Reilly identifies found 80 per cent of mothers said they were responsible for home-schooling. “It's just this sort of assumption everybody go home and we'll carry on as usual and mothers will do it right, they always do it, they are expected to still be working full-time with children at home,” she said.
“Children just don't educate themselves, they don't just amuse themselves. If you have a child in kindergarten who has to be in class, the mother has to be sitting there and has to oversee, or the little one is not going to do their work.”
Kristina, who asked that her last name not be used, is a Toronto teacher. She describes teaching during the pandemic with children at home as “giving everything you've got to both ends.”
“I have this big responsibility to my students and it's my job, what I'm hired to do. But of course I have my own two little ones at home, and for any parent your own kids are also a priority.”
O'Reilly said traditional roles for women are not viewed as having productive or economic value. “You don't pay for it, it's seen as unskilled, it's seen as something women just do naturally or they do it because they love their children.”
She said until the pandemic is over we won't realize the extent of what is lost, the true costs to the economy of COVID-19's impact on women.
“There will be an impact of the pandemic on women and the economy. Women will have reduced income, women will have to go back to work with even less childcare centres than before.”
CHILDREN JUST DON'T EDUCATE THEMSELVES, THEY DON'T JUST AMUSE THEMSELVES.