Rising to the (unequal) challenge

It’s become a cliché to say that we live in challenging times. The pandemic has sorely tested public services, business models and assumptions about our ways of working. But it has proved particularly challenging for women.

Not only were women hit harder in terms of employment – they were about 30% more likely than men to work in sectors shut down by the government and almost twice as likely to be laid off. When working from home, they’ve borne the greater share of the home schooling and usual chores. Women, on average, did two-thirds more of the daily childcare than men during the first lockdown. In a previous blog I welcomed the tentative signs that this shared experience of working from home had challenged more fathers to widen their parenting duties.