Women’s balancing act

Tak­ing care of chil­dren, cook­ing, wash­ing clothes and clean­ing while also tele­work­ing has been the sit­u­a­tion for many women since March. Those un­able to work from home have seen a 100% re­duc­tion in their work­ing hours, while oth­ers are un­em­ployed and oth­ers have con­tin­ued going to work with, in many cases, their chil­dren left alone at home. Among the worst hit have been house­holds with one par­ent, of which 79% are fe­male sin­gle-par­ent fam­i­lies. In fact, the data show that the pan­demic in gen­eral has af­fected women the most. There has been more un­em­ploy­ment among women and more job in­se­cu­rity, while they have also suf­fered more stress dur­ing the pan­demic.

How does this fit with the con­cept of bal­anc­ing work with fam­ily life? Ac­cord­ing to a study by the Cen­tre for Opin­ion Stud­ies car­ried out from May 4 to 15, some 36.5% of men spent five hours or less a week doing chores at home and 10.5% ac­knowl­edged that they usu­ally did noth­ing. Lock­down and the health cri­sis - which is not yet over - have been ex­pe­ri­enced dif­fer­ently in each house­hold ac­cord­ing to gen­der.

This by no means im­plies that the re­la­tion­ship be­tween women and men is some sort of strug­gle be­tween good and evil, but the num­bers do not lie. It should also be noted that, ac­cord­ing to the ex­perts, while data are avail­able on het­ero­sex­ual fam­i­lies, data on other types of unions are lack­ing. The virus has put the focus on every as­pect of our lives, and one of these is gen­der equal­ity. While for many years we have heard about the “glass ceil­ing”, that in­vis­i­ble bar­rier that pre­vents women from being pro­moted to man­age­ment po­si­tions, Covid-19 has shone the light on the “sticky floor” con­cept. Ac­cord­ing to the Cen­tre for So­ci­o­log­i­cal Stud­ies on Every­day Life and Work, it is “im­pos­si­ble for many women to get pro­moted in their jobs be­cause they are mostly em­ployed in labour-in­ten­sive sec­tors, with pre­car­i­ous work­ing con­di­tions, with poor pay and char­ac­terised by low lev­els of pro­mo­tion.” These are sec­tors such as clean­ing or those in­volv­ing car­ing for peo­ple.

The Women, Busi­ness and Econ­omy Ob­ser­va­tory says that of the 715,000 peo­ple at the fore­front of the fight against coro­n­avirus in Cat­alo­nia, 65% are women. “These are fem­i­nised and in­se­cure sec­tors that, para­dox­i­cally, are the ones that, by de­cree, have been es­tab­lished as es­sen­tial since the state of alarm was de­clared. Why, if both paid and un­paid care work is vital, does it not have the recog­ni­tion and value it de­serves?” In June, the Cata­lan gov­ern­ment pub­lished The Eco­nomic Im­pact of the Covid-19 Cri­sis from a Gen­der Per­spec­tive. The list of vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties it de­tails, from the first page, is long: women are still the main ones re­spon­si­ble for the home and every­thing that goes with it, while moth­ers in sin­gle-par­ent fam­i­lies are the least likely to achieve a bal­ance be­tween work and fam­ily life, and some have been left with­out any in­come.

The sur­vey by Lídia Farré and Lib­er­tad González car­ried out on­line from April 4 to 30 as­sesses the eco­nomic and so­cial im­pact of Covid-19. Farré is a pro­fes­sor at Barcelona Uni­ver­sity and an as­so­ci­ate re­searcher at the In­sti­tute of Eco­nomic Analy­sis. “The dis­tri­b­u­tion of house­hold chores has re­mained the same as be­fore Covid-19. If it was 60% for women and 40% for men, it has con­tin­ued like this, ex­cept for the task of going shop­ping, which is the only job that men have taken over. It doesn’t mean that men haven’t done any­thing, be­cause the in­creased need for car­ing for chil­dren or the el­derly, for cook­ing or clean­ing has been very great. Men have in­creased the num­ber of hours they spend on do­mes­tic tasks, but we have not reached 50-50. In fact, in cou­ples in which both have tele­worked, the most log­i­cal thing would have been to share it like this, but that’s not what we’ve seen in the sur­veys.” Al­though the re­search is on­go­ing, it has al­ready been shown that gen­der roles are well-es­tab­lished and have very deep roots.

Some­thing else that is key, ex­perts say, is moth­er­hood. The roles that so­ci­ety at­trib­utes to women - or that women have come to ac­cept - be­come very de­fined when chil­dren ar­rive. Yet, Farré re­flects on the pos­i­tive change brought about by the cri­sis and com­pares it to when fa­thers began tak­ing pa­ter­nity leave and “they be­came more in­volved in life­long par­ent­ing.” One study, she says, found “a pos­i­tive im­pact from men’s con­tri­bu­tion to house­hold chores.” And she con­tin­ues: “The hope is that be­cause the lock­down was much longer than pa­ter­nity leave these men have in­creased their par­tic­i­pa­tion. There has been an ap­pren­tice­ship dur­ing the lock­down! There are fa­thers who are now more aware of the sit­u­a­tion: that the kids do ex­tracur­ric­u­lar ac­tiv­i­ties on Tues­days and Thurs­days, that the fridge needs fill­ing to be able to make lunch... If dur­ing this pe­riod men have taken their chil­dren to the park or spent more time with them, why can’t they go on to fin­ish work early and go to pick them up from school?”

There is rea­son for hope, but there are opin­ions of all kinds. There are also those who think we are going too slow, that the steps being taken can­not sat­isfy the de­sire for change. A sur­vey on the use of time and the lock­down from the Cen­tre for Opin­ion Stud­ies pro­vides shock­ing num­bers. Car­ried out be­tween May 4 and 15, one ques­tion was whether there was an equal dis­tri­b­u­tion of tasks. Some 42.6% of men made a very gen­er­ous as­sess­ment of them­selves and said they al­ready equally shared the tasks be­fore the lock­down. How­ever, only 27.1% of women said that was the case. When asked if house­work was shared among the whole fam­ily in the lock­down, 75.3% of men said it was but only 54.2% of women said that was the case. Whether the men mag­ni­fied their role or min­imised that of their part­ner, what is clear is that the num­bers do not add up.

The Com­plutense Uni­ver­sity’s psy­chopathol­ogy re­search group on af­fec­tive and psy­chotic dis­or­ders stud­ied the psy­cho­log­i­cal re­sponse to Covid-19 in Spain. Symp­toms of de­pres­sion (27.8% in women, 17% in men) and anx­i­ety (26.8% in women and 13.2% in men) have been dif­fer­ent for each gen­der. Part of the men­tal bur­den is due to man­age­ment. With chil­dren at home and par­ents tele­work­ing, who gets to use the com­puter when, and who works early in the day and who later on? Or­gan­i­sa­tion is per­haps the most im­por­tant as­pect of home life and is also the most in­vis­i­ble. One ex­pert says this: “Men may have gone shop­ping, but who wrote the list?”

fea­ture

fea­ture