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.
