Many families before COVID were juggling caring work with jobs, domestic labour and all the other demands inherent in getting out of bed in the morning and back into it at night. Then the pandemic hit and, especially in Victoria, where lockdown kept children at home and constrained disability services, the demands of domestic and caring work skyrocketed.
In heterosexual relationship, women, of course, picked up most of the additional unpaid work created by COVID. And they suffered for it. Research by Monash University found that “women’s unpaid labour time increased significantly more in the pandemic than did men’s” and this was connected to an increase in depression, anxiety, irritability and feeling overwhelmed.
It was women over 50 who were caring for children during lockdown who suffered the most, according to the research. While there’s no way to know for sure, it seems likely that older women would have older children and the stress of caring for adolescent or young adult children might be higher for women who have been shouldering the majority of caring responsibilities for decades. Especially when those older children might be carrying their own anxiety about job loss, remote studying and isolation.
Which brings up another highly gendered type of work, one that is much more difficult to measure: emotional labour. It’s the effort of remembering allergies, birthdays, favourite meals and persistent health problems. It’s noticing that someone has been unusually quiet lately and making (the right kind of) time to find out why. It’s planning playdates, shopping lists and dinner parties, while listening empathetically to male partners saying they can’t share their vulnerabilities with anyone else. It’s pulling in the people who dominate a conversation and pulling aside the ones who got shouted down. It’s putting aside our own worries to concentrate on noticing, thinking, reacting and planning; and it is work almost always done by women.
The Monash study didn’t specifically include this work in their survey questions, but it shows through in the results. Men with families and jobs take more time for themselves and are more satisfied with their lives than women with families and jobs. They always have been.
This dynamic was exacerbated during COVID when, as always happens in a crisis, the fault lines were torn open and all the underlying problems were laid bare.
This is a health issue and a social issue and a justice issue, but it is also an economic issue.
Men earn close to twice the amount of money that women do over a lifetime. Not because they’re smarter, more ambitious or inherently better at getting promotions (they’re not).
It’s because gendered expectations make women responsible for the majority of childcare, domestic work and emotional labour. This work, which takes such physical, emotional and mental effort, is not valued as are the traditionally man-only spheres of leadership, risk-taking and governance, and so it is not respected or paid. When that work becomes more onerous (as, for example, during a pandemic) women become even more overwhelmed by the effort involved and more aware of how little their effort is appreciated.
Having men at home “helping out” didn’t change this dynamic during the first lockdown in Australia. It will be fascinating to find out what happened in Melbourne during the second lockdown and how that compares to the rest of the country. Maybe more time in isolation gave men a chance to see the value in the work they’d never noticed before. Maybe such concentrated demands were enough to help women decide they’d had enough and were going to resign from the second shift.
Or maybe the polarising forces of fear and isolation hardened the expectations of gendered work even further.
We won’t know for some time which way it will go, but what we do know is that stereotypical gender roles harm everyone. Men, women, trans, and non-binary people are all hurt by prescriptive expectations of what we can or should do because of our gender.
Maybe this is our opportunity to change that, even if only a little bit. Surely at least, it’s worth a try?
Jane Gilmore was the founding editor of The King’s Tribune. She is now a freelance journalist and author, with a particular interest in feminism, media and data journalism and has written for The Guardian, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Daily Telegraph, The Saturday Paper and Meanjin, among many others. Jane has a Master of Journalism from the University of Melbourne, and her book FixedIt: Violence and the Representation of Women in the Media was published by Penguin Random House in 2019.
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