SistersGeographic

The Pandemic’s Impact on Women

by Emily Bloodworth

The Covid-19 pandemic has affected everyone, but as employment rates fall and stress levels rise, it is clear that the pandemic has disproportionately affected women, both in their careers and at home, throughout the world. This includes American women. According to an October 2020 data report from Morning Consult, a data intelligence company, women in the United States are twice as likely as men to have left the workforce due to childcare needs at home during the pandemic, at a rate of 16% versus 8%. Women with children under two have been particularly affected, leaving the workforce at a rate of 42%. This massive exodus has put American women’s employment back to where it was in the 1980s, according to a report by Pallavi Gogoi for NPR.

And race plays a part too. Morning Consult statistics show that White women in the U.S. have left the workforce during the pandemic at a rate of 22% compared with 29% of Black women. This disparity is not shocking considering that before Covid-19, Black women (and men) experienced higher unemployment rates, not to mention lower wages, than White women (and men), according to a June 2020 report published by the Economic Policy Institute. But the worst-hit ethnic group has been Hispanic women, who left the American workforce during the pandemic at a rate of 35 percent.

Yet even for women who have been able to keep their jobs, the pandemic has caused serious struggles, regardless of ethnicity or location. Dr. Sarah Kuborn, assistant professor of family studies at Southeast Missouri State University, says that the pandemic has changed the way she views the balance of her roles as a professor and parent. “My husband travels for work, so when the pandemic hit, he lost his job for a while. I worked from home and my husband was the primary caretaker for the most part. After six weeks, we realized this is not sustainable for us,” says Kuborn. “I still felt the need to be involved in [my daughter’s] day-to-day life, so I still put her down for naps because she wouldn’t go to sleep for him. I still nursed her. I still had those moments where I had to step away from work and interrupt my day and be taking care of her even with him home.”

These challenges caused Kuborn to think about the roles she and her husband take on at home, particularly when it comes to the “second shift” of unpaid domestic work parents do after a day of paid labor. “People are noticing it more now with the pandemic. People are absolutely exhausted,” Kuborn says. “No matter if you’re a utilitarian family or a traditional gender role family, it’s important that both partners know the other’s expectations and what they are expected to do.”

Academics and researchers across the board have been noting the added challenges women face during the pandemic. Eve Rodsky, a Harvard-educated researcher and New York Times bestselling author of Fair Play: A Game-Changing Solution for When You Have Too Much to Do, says that the pandemic has caused a 153% increase in the domestic work women do at home. Part of this is because women take on what is referred to in Fair Play as the “daily grind” jobs, repetitive daily tasks like helping the kids with homework, preparing meals, and washing dishes, whereas men tend to take on less time-consuming tasks such as watering the plants. With school closures leading to increased amounts of schoolwork and more meals at home, this increased workload during the pandemic has only further tipped the scale. “Women devalue their own time by saying things like ‘I do more because I’m a better multitasker,’ or ‘I do more because in the time I could take to tell him/her/them what to do, I could do it myself,’” says Rodsky.

Kuborn concurs, and says this can-do attitude from women who insist on taking on an overwhelming amount of responsibility is part of what she calls “gatekeeping,” a term for when women take on too much responsibility at home because they find it easier to do the work themselves than to communicate their needs to their partner. “It’s a defense mechanism and a survival technique to maintain the household, to make sure that things are done and to make sure that things are taken care of,” says Kuborn.

However, Kuborn qualifies that “gatekeeping” doesn’t mean that all women are control freaks and all men are lazy. Rather, it shows a need for healthy communication between partners about each family member’s needs. Rodsky agrees. “True boundaries means saying that your time is diamonds and you want as much choice over how you spend your time as your partner has,” says Rodsky.

One way for couples to begin a communication shift is to talk about the “why” of a task rather than the “what.” Rodsky saw this play out in her own life when her husband would take out the trash but forget to put a new trash bag in the bin. This upset Rodsky, not only because she had to finish her husband's chore, but because of something she endured during her childhood. Instead of having a regular garbage can in the kitchen growing up, Rodsky, who was brought up by a single mother, had a flimsy plastic bag that hung from a doorknob that would often overflow, spill out on the floor and attract roaches. To this day, Rodsky associates incomplete trash chores with a filthy, sticky kitchen and the stressors of her childhood. When she was able to communicate this to her husband, it helped him understand why task completion was so important to her and he adjusted his actions. Today, he understands that when he's in charge of trash, he's responsible not only for taking it outside but also for putting the trash bins out on pickup day and relining the indoor trash bin with a new trash bag.

Though much of bringing equality to domestic responsibility begins with discussion between partners, there are steps employers can take to help ease the pandemic’s toll on working women. Kuborn says that reducing brief meetings to emails, being accepting of parents who may have children on-screen during video calls, and general flexibility with remote work will make for happier, healthier, and more productive employees. In addition, employers will need to be accommodating in the years to come. If someone has a gap on their resume because they took a year off of work to homeschool their children during school closures, employers should not hold that against potential new hires or promotion candidates.

Whether they have been forced to leave their jobs to take care of children at home, been laid off, juggled work with domestic responsibility or attempted to work safely during a pandemic, all women have struggled this past year. Here are some ways you can help women during the ongoing pandemic:

Have conversations at home.
Donate to a women’s shelter.
Donate to one of these organizations.