Child-care demands at home rocketed during the pandemic, but men and women did not split the burden equally.
Globally, women took on 173 additional hours of unpaid child care last year, compared to 59 additional hours for men, a study released Friday by the Center for Global Development, a poverty nonprofit, found. The gap widened in low- and middle-income countries, where women cared for children for more than three times as many hours as men did.
Charles Kenny, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development and one of the study's authors, said the pandemic merely exposed existing gender disparities.
"Every year there are trillions of hours of unpaid care work being done, the considerable majority by women," he said. "We are not going to get gender equality until that burden is more evenly shared."
The study used figures from Unesco and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation & Development to measure the number of children home from school and the average time men and women in various countries spent on unpaid child care before the pandemic. In India, where school closures added 176-billion hours of child care, the study estimated that women took on more than 10 times the burden men did.
Some governments tried to help families. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau proposed lowering the cost of daycare to C$10 (about R115) a day. Australian lawmakers are considering A$1.7bn (about R18bn) in child-care subsidies. The US government allocated $53bn (about R746bn) to keep day-care centres from closing during the pandemic.
Those measures haven't been enough and Kenny warned that the disparities won't disappear. "The exhaustion, the stresses on families - they don't just go away when kids go back to school. This could be something that has a fairly long shadow."
Bloomberg
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