Principal investigator: Eduarda Miller de Figueiredo
Article title: The impact of Covid-19 on gender equality
Article authors: Titan Alon, Matthias Doepke, Jane Olmstead-Rumsey and Michèle Tertilt
Sample size: 130 million families – households
Location of the intervention: U.S
Sector: Gender
Type of interventionEffects of Covid-19 on inequality
genre
Main variable of interestGender inequality
Assessment method: Others
Policy Problem
The Covid-19 pandemic presents itself as a health emergency and, as a consequence, has brought about a major global economic slowdown. Therefore, the literature has shown that the effects of the current crisis affect men and women differently.
In “standard” recessions, such as the 2008 recession, job losses for men were much greater than for women. One of the reasons for this is that more men work in heavy industries, which were more severely affected in “standard” recessions, compared to women, whose work is concentrated in less cyclical sectors, such as health, education, etc. In this regard, Coskun and Dalgic (2020) find that the “Government” and “Education and Health Services” sectors are countercyclical, with 40% of jobs held by women and only 20% by men.
As seen, the impacts on different sectors of the economy will vary depending on the level of impact. Therefore, two factors should be highlighted:
1. If the demand for the production of the factor is affected by the orders to “stay at home” (no impact on essential services – pharmacies, supermarkets –, large negative impact on the hotel and travel sector).
2. Whether the nature of the work allows for teleworking or not (no impact on higher education, major impact on manufacturing).
Assessment Context
The recession caused by the coronavirus has a greater impact on sectors with a high female workforce, such as restaurants, schools, and hospitals. For example, several countries decided to close schools and daycare centers. This situation resulted in more than 1,5 billion children not attending school and, consequently, drastically increased the need for childcare at home.
It is known that the burden of childcare still falls more heavily on the mother than on the father, thus affecting women even more. Not to mention single mothers, who are often in economically disadvantaged positions and are therefore even more affected by the economic recession resulting from Covid-19.
In the United States, there are 73,5 million children under the age of 18, of whom 21% live only with their mother, while 4% live only with their father. Therefore, with the closure of schools due to the Covid-19 pandemic, 21% of children would be at risk of living in poverty because single mothers are unable to work and informal forms of childcare are extremely discouraged at this time.
Policy Details
The unequal division of responsibility for childcare between men and women is rooted in persistent social norms. With the shock of Covid-19, is there any possibility that these social norms will "move" towards greater gender equality? To assess this, the authors draw a parallel between the Covid-19 crisis and the last major shock to women in the labor market, which occurred during World War II. During the war, millions of women entered the workforce to replace men in factories and other workplaces. Furthermore, Fernández, Fogli, and Olivetti (2004) demonstrate that boys who grow up in a family where the mother works are more likely to marry women who also work.
And how might what happened in World War II be related to what could possibly happen during the Covid-19 crisis? During the current crisis, fathers worked from home and assumed a greater degree of responsibility for childcare. And, even though women experience a greater increase in the need for childcare, men have also experienced an increase in the time spent on childcare. Thus, the authors suggest that this greater exposure is likely to have at least some lasting effects on future contributions to childcare, whether through learning, a greater amount of information about what children are actually doing throughout the day, or increased attachment to children.
Methodology Details
Seeking to understand the complex relationship between gender inequality and the various impacts stemming from the coronavirus crisis, this article combined insights from existing literature with data on the distribution of women, men, and couples by occupation and the division of labor in the home. This allowed for a study of how the pandemic affected gender inequality.
To assess how women and men in the labor market are exposed to the crisis, the authors used data from the American Time Use Survey – ATUS, which allows observation of the fraction of workers in a given occupation and whether they are able to work remotely. This data showed that 28% of male workers are able to work remotely, but only 22% of women are employed in positions that allow remote work. Therefore, in the Covid-19 crisis, more men are adapting to the change in the work environment and more women are facing the potential loss of employment, which is the opposite of the pattern in normal economic crises.
Main results
Regarding family types, couples who work full-time represent 44% of all couples with children, therefore a large group affected by the increased needs for childcare. Families where the husband works full-time and the wife stays at home with household chores represent only 25% of couples with children. Only 5% of families have the family arrangement where the woman works full-time and the husband stays at home.
Therefore, in summary, the data suggests that women will be far more affected by the increased need for childcare resulting from the closure of schools and daycare centers during the crisis. The 15 million single mothers in the United States will be much more severely impacted, with limited access to other sources of childcare due to social distancing orders. Thus, supporting these women and their children during the crisis is one of the most immediate and important political challenges in the current context.
The coronavirus crisis has brought serious and unprecedented challenges to families, especially those with less capacity to cope, such as low-income single mothers. This situation is a major problem for current governments, which need policies to address these specific challenges arising from the COVID-19 crisis. Therefore, the authors suggest some policies to address these challenges:
1. Government subsidies to replace the wages of workers who need to provide childcare during the crisis due to school closures, thus preventing them from working.
2. Suspend work requirements for government assistance programs until schools reopen.
3. Remove the requirement to be actively seeking work to be eligible for unemployment insurance during the pandemic.
4. Extend unemployment benefits to workers who voluntarily resign to care for children.
Evidently, the authors point out that each policy involves a series of trade-offs with factors that include budgetary impact and work incentives. Even more so in the United States, where health insurance is often employment-based, job protection would have an additional effect of preserving health insurance. Therefore, it demonstrates itself as a relevant additional factor for evaluating public policies in relation to the pandemic crisis.
Lessons in Public Policy
Although some channels that may have beneficial effects were identified, the authors emphasized that the short-term challenges arising from the Covid-19 crisis are serious, especially for single mothers and families lacking the capacity to combine work and childcare at home.
Reference
ALON, Titan et al. The impact of COVID-19 on gender equality. National Bureau of economic research, 2020.
