Virus penalizes working moms
Women have carried outsize share of burden during the pandemic
Working during the pandemic has meant very different things for Virginia Dressler and for her husband, Brandon.
As he, a delivery driver, continued his routes near their home in Newbury, Ohio, she spent her days caring for their 3-year-old twins. Only after her husband came home at 6 p.m. could she turn to her job as a digital projects librarian at Kent State University, finishing her eight-hour shift from home at about 2 a.m.
Later, he was furloughed and took over some of the child care responsibilities. But now, with the economy reopening, the prospect of being summoned back to campus fills Virginia Dressler with more anxiety: Day care centers are just starting to reopen, with restrictions, so who will take care of their children?
“All of these things are spinning around in my head,” she said. “We’re trying to come up with plan A, plan B and plan C.”
As the pandemic upends work and home life, women have carried an outsize share of the burden, more likely to lose a job and more likely to shoulder the load of closed schools and day care. For many working mothers, the gradual reopening won’t solve their problems but compound them — forcing them out of the labor force or into part-time jobs while increasing their responsibilities at home.
The impact could last a lifetime, reducing their earning potential and work opportunities.
“We could have an entire generation of women who are hurt,” Betsey Stevenson, a professor of economics and public policy at the University of Michigan, said of pregnant women and working mothers whose children are too young to manage on their own.
Women who drop out of the workforce to take care of children often have trouble getting back in, and the longer they stay out, the harder it is.
The setback comes at a striking moment. In February, right before the outbreak began to spread in the United States, working women passed a rare milestone — making up more than half the nation’s civilian nonfarm labor force.
Still, they do a disproportionate share of the work at home. Among married couples who work full time, women provide close to 70% of child care during standard working hours, according to recent economic research. That burden has been supersized as schools and other activities shut down and help from cleaning services and babysitters has been curtailed.
“This pandemic has exposed some weaknesses in American society that were always there,” said Stevenson, a former chief economist at the U.S. Labor Department, “and one of them is the incomplete transition of women into truly equal roles in the labor market.”
U.S. parents have nearly doubled the time they were spending on education and household tasks before the coronavirus outbreak, to 59 hours per week from 30, with mothers spending 15 hours more on average than fathers, according to a report from Boston Consulting Group.
Even before the pandemic, women with children were more likely than men to be worried about their performance reviews at work and their mental well-being and to be sleeping fewer hours.
The inequities that existed before are now “on steroids,” said Claudia Goldin, an economics professor at Harvard University. And since workplaces tend to reward hours logged, Goldin said, women are at a further disadvantage.
“As work opens up, husbands have an edge,” she said, and if the husband works more, the wife will have to work less.