Do women come out much worse off from a pandemic?

Pandemics, we are told, don’t tend to care about gender, nationality, wealth or personal circumstances. Yet there might be reason to believe that pandemics treat men and women very differently.

Certainly, evidence points to the probability that women fare worse during pandemics.  Movement restriction has seen levels of domestic abuse rise worldwide since the coronavirus – an increase in 30 per cent in some areas of Ireland. Certainly, domestic violence isn't exclusively directed towards women, but research shows that over twice as many women than men experience it. Women are also more likely to be made redundant, according to the UK-based Women's Budget Group; they are also more likely to be self-employed. Julia Smith, a health-policy researcher at Simon Fraser University in the US has revealed that during the Ebola outbreak in 2014, men's income returned to what they had made pre-outbreak faster than women's income.

It was recently reported that within academia, research by women has plummeted, while according to the Comparative Political Studies Journal, articles from men have increased by 50 per cent. As Dr Elizabeth Hannon, deputy editor for the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, tweeted that submissions from women had dropped, female academics in their droves cited the challenge of coping with childcare and work during lockdown.

Added to this, a recent poll for the New York Times revealed that nearly half of all fathers with children under 12 believe they're spending more time on school work than their spouse. Interestingly, only 3 per cent of women in these heterosexual relationships agree.

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Overall, 80 per cent of mothers say they’re spending more time than their partner on home-schooling.

On deck

Even the most equally minded houses appear to be sent askew by the new way of doing things. In many households with two incomes, equilibrium has often been achieved with couples because a third party is helping with children, whether it’s a crèche, school, family member or childminder. Take that away, and someone has to pick up the slack. This is usually the party that is paid less, or has a more flexible working arrangement. To be fair, this is a situation borne not so much from the patriarchy, but plain practicality.

Certainly, I know plenty of men who are pulling their own weight within the home; stepping up, and tag-teaming with partners so that one parent is always out “on deck”. But on the other hand, pals have observed that within the WhatsApp groups of their children’s schools or parent clusters, dads are conspicuous by their silence among the chatter.

Even before coronavirus, sociology professor Arlie Hochschild coined the term “the second shift” in the 1970s, referring to the additional job of housework and childcare. In 2015, Hochschild found that women still spend two, if not three, times as much time on care and routine housework compared to men.

There’s also much talk about women and “emotional labour” during the pandemic, although I’m not sure I buy into the idea that it’s a damning indictment on gender relations as much as others do. Emotional labour, a term also coined by Hochschild (in 1983), refers to the life admin where we are required to display specific, benevolent emotions towards others. Think of the sort of insidious duties that women tend to automatically shoulder; arranging play-dates for kids, remembering to send birthday cards, sending a Christmas present to the in-laws, sorting Rice Krispie cakes for class, remembering dinner-party wine.

This sort of stuff has been described as integral to the harmonious domestic life, but really, it’s about keeping up appearances, so that others don’t think your family are a bunch of savages. It’s not that men are thoughtless – they just don’t care that much what others think of them.

But the term “emotional labour” becomes problematic, turning the politesse of remembering your kid’s teacher’s name into actual work. Ultimately, if you don’t want to send a thank you note or keep in touch with an elderly relative, simply don’t do it. Don’t feel obliged to, on account of your gender.

Swan labour

I think it’s high time that we move away from the emotional labour discourse to what I’m now calling the “swan labour” – the tasks that make everything look ordered and functioning on the surface, but take an element of activity behind the scenes. The stuff that is done almost invisibly, but is central to the running of things. Ask yourself this: who is the person in your house who buys the toilet paper? The cooking salt? The handwash? The bin bags? Who cleans out the sink plughole? This is the real unacknowledged, essential stuff. Whether this is the domain of men or women is moot. If things are unequal in your home, have a word and get some housebreaking done. It’s got nothing to do with your having a set of ovaries or not.

Perhaps the current climate is not all bad in that regard. If this is the moment in history during which we re-evaluate the important, slough off the superfluous and culturally return ourselves en masse to factory settings, why can’t that apply to redressing this domestic balance? Whether you’re a man or woman, the “you’re at home more” defence is null and void. In theory, with two parties at home for the same amount of time, the domestic workload should be shared.

If you’re the one unfairly shouldering the spadework, whether man or woman, the time to address that is now.