Cleaning finger paint off the floor and making coloured pasta for kids to squish is not everyone's dream job but for Michelle Young, it is perfect right now.
With a nearly-two-year-old in tow, she struggled to find a job during the pandemic.
She considered hospitality work but did not want to risk bringing the virus home.
She also looked at returning to childcare, but that would have meant a return to low wages.
Ms Young was therefore thrilled to find work with Messy Makers, a sensory playgroup set up outside cafes and in parks across Sydney where kids can learn through play — and their parents are spared the clean-up.
Leading a group in Glenmore Park in Sydney's outer west, Ms Young was able to take Zac with her, do some of the preparation work at home and balance work with keeping her home running.
Then lockdowns hit.
"I'm a casual worker and so during that time, I didn't work at all," she said.
But now the groups are back up and running and Ms Young is working about 16 hours a week.
Ms Young's experience is very similar to that of many women across the country.
Employment data shows when it came to re-entering the workforce after lockdown, women outpaced men in picking up jobs.
According to the Financy Women's Index report for December 2021, female part-time employment increased in 15 out of 19 sectors in 2021, whereas male part-time employment fell in 17 of those sectors.
Full-time female employment fell in five sectors, but for men, it fell in nine sectors.
Grattan Institute chief executive Danielle Wood said the pattern of women moving in and out of work reflected the path of lockdown because the sectors hardest hit — hospitality, travel, retail — were big employers of women.
"We know that lockdowns are particularly bad for women's jobs," she said.
'A long, long two years'
Amy Titchener founded Messy Makers as an alternative to working in childcare, which she found hard when she had her own baby.
She launched it at the start of the pandemic and while her husband's job stayed steady, her work came and went over the past two years.
"We were always the first ones to close and, unfortunately, being a kids' activity [we were] the last ones to reopen," she said.
"It was a long, long two years with not really making anything."
Lockdowns have set back her plans to expand and hire more staff.
"It's like starting from scratch every time," she said.
Ms Wood is one of the economic advisors who contributed to the Financy Women's Index.
She said the long-term effects of women moving in and out of work during the pandemic were still not clear.
"We know that women are already more likely to have stop-start careers and that can have longer-term implications for earnings trajectories and lifetime incomes," she said.
One thing that is clear, however, is that women's earnings have not kept pace with men's.
According to the Financy Women's Index, the gap between men's and women's earnings widened in the December quarter.
That gap is most notable in the health care and social assistance sector (20.7 per cent) and education and training (11.4 per cent).
In the Index's December report, Financy founder Bianca Hartge-Hazelman said the pandemic drove demand for services dominated by women, like healthcare and childcare, but those skills continued to be underpaid.
"We, as a society, continue to undervalue the face-to-face services of these predominantly female workforces, many of whom are on the front line of the COVID-19 crisis," she wrote.
Ms Young loved learning about and working in childcare but said that supporting young children emotionally for up to 12 hours a day was draining work.
And that despite all the care and attention staff put into it, it does not pay well.
"I don't think that people are aware what we do," she said.
"We are there to be a mother and be a father, be a doctor and be a teacher, all these things and teach the children [about] the world around them."
Unpaid work holding women back
As well as being underpaid, many women are still doing more than their fair share of unpaid work.
According to the latest Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey, which used data collected in the first year of the pandemic, men spent 41 per cent of their time in unpaid work, up from 40 per cent in 2019, while women spent 61 per cent, down from 62 per cent.
Time spent on unpaid work is time taken from potentially productive work.
Ms Young said she would like to study for a degree in education but can not fit it in around all the unpaid work she does at home
"I always wanted to be a primary school teacher," she said.
Ms Young reckons she does 70 per cent of the unpaid work in her home, but that if she asks her partner he will help out.
For example, she has a list of things she has in her head to make sure Zac is looked after and the house functions well.
Those mental lists are what has become known as the "mental load", Leah Ruppanner from The Future of Work Lab at the University of Melbourne said.
Professor Ruppanner said it was a form of emotional work because it came from the worry, care and love felt for family.
That made it hard to say whether women were more heavily burdened than men by this work during the pandemic, she said.
“It's all of that additional labour that we don't really quantify, we don't think about, we don't include in our measures of housework that are critical,” she said.
Sharing the load
Ms Titchener and her husband Lee both use the phrase "stretched thin" to describe raising two small kids while one parent works full time and the other runs a business.
On the day the ABC visited their Berowra home, she said driving to and from the Penrith playgroup had tired her out.
Fielding work emails with energetic kids underfoot did not help.
What does make a significant difference for her is that Lee Titchener helps a lot around the house.
"When I feel like I'm overly stretched, Lee will step up even more, so I'm quite lucky in that sense," she said.
Despite being knocked around by every wave of the pandemic, Ms Titchener's business now operates in 15 locations and employs seven staff -- all mums with young kids.
"If Lee wasn't so involved at home, I definitely wouldn't be able to at least do half the sessions that we do."
