Has Covid-19 impacted men and women differently?

Responsible researcher: 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 intervention : United States

Sector : Gender

Type of intervention
gender inequality

Variable of main interest : Gender inequality

Assessment method : Others

Policy Problem

The pandemic caused by Covid-19 presents itself as a health emergency and, as a consequence, has brought a major global economic slowdown. Therefore, the literature has demonstrated that the effects of the current crisis affect men and women differently.

In “standard” recessions, like the one in 2008, for example, job losses for men were much greater than for women. One of the reasons is that more men work in heavy industries, which were hit harder in the “standard” recessions, when compared to women, who have their work concentrated in less cyclical sectors, such as health, education , etc. In relation to this, Coskun and Dalgic (2020) discover that the “Government” and “Education and Health Services” sectors are countercyclical, and that they have 40% of women in job vacancies, and only 20% are men.

As seen, there will be differences in impacts on sectors of the economy depending on the level at which they were affected. Thus, there are two factors to be considered:

1. Whether demand for factor production is affected by “stay at home” orders (no impact on essential services – pharmacies, supermarkets –, major negative impact on hospitality and travel sector).

2. Whether the nature of the work allows for telecommuting or not (no impact on higher education, major impact on manufacturing).

Assessment Context

The recession caused by the coronavirus has a greater impact profile in sectors where there is a high female participation in the workforce, such as restaurants, schools and hospitals. For example, several countries have decided to close schools and daycare centers. This situation meant that more than 1.5 billion children did not go to school and, consequently, the need for child care at home increased drastically.

It is known that the distribution of the task of caring for children still falls more on the mother than on the father, therefore affecting women even more. Without forgetting single mothers, who are often in a disadvantaged economic position, 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 which 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 cannot work and informal forms of childcare are extremely discouraged at the moment.

Policy Details

The unequal division of childcare responsibilities 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 for women in the job market, which occurred in the Second World War. Whereas during the war, millions of women entered the workforce to replace men in factories and other workplaces. Furthermore, Fernandéz, Fogli and Olivetti (2004) demonstrate that boys who grow up in a family where their mother works are more likely to marry women who also work.

And how could what happened in the Second World War be related to what could possibly happen during the Covid-19 crisis? During the current crisis, parents have worked from home and taken on greater responsibility for childcare. And, even though women experience an increase in the need for child care to a greater extent, men also experience an increase in the time spent on child care. Thus, the authors state that this greater exposure is likely to have at least some persistent effects on future contributions to child care, whether through learning, greater 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 arising from the coronavirus crisis, the article combined insights from existing literature with data on the distribution of women, men and couples by occupations and the division of labor in the home. Thus, it made it possible to study how the pandemic affected gender inequality.

To assess how women and men in the job market are exposed to the crisis, the authors used data from the American Time Use Survey – ATUS, which allows observing the fraction of workers in a given occupation and whether they are capable of working remotely. Such data demonstrated 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 adapt to the changed work environment and more women face potential job loss, which is the opposite of the pattern of normal economic crises.

Main Results

In terms of family types, full-time working couples represent 44% of all couples with children, therefore a large group affected by increased childcare needs. Families where the husband works full-time and the wife remains at home with household chores represent only 25% of couples with children. Only 5% of families have a family arrangement where the woman works full time and the husband stays at home.

So, in summary, the data suggests that women will be much more affected by the increased need for child care that arises from school and daycare closures during the crisis. Where the 15 million single mothers in the United States will be much more severely affected, with little potential access to other sources of child care due to shelter-in-place orders. Therefore, supporting these women and their children during the crisis is one of the greatest political challenges of greatest immediacy and importance in the current context.

The coronavirus crisis has brought serious and unprecedented challenges to families, especially those families with the least capacity to respond, such as low-income single mothers. This situation is a major problem for current governments, which need policies to deal with these specific challenges arising from the Covid-19 crisis. Because of this, the authors suggest some policies to face these challenges:

1. Government subsidies to replace wages for workers who need to provide childcare during the crisis due to school closures and thus unable to work.

2. Suspend work requirements for government assistance programs until school reopens.

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 quit to care for children.

Evidently, the authors point out that each policy involves a series of compensations with factors that involve budgetary impact and work incentives. Even more so in the United States, where health insurance is often based on employment, thus employment protection would have an additional preservation effect on health insurance. Therefore, it proves to be an additional relevant factor for evaluating public policies in relation to the pandemic crisis.

Public Policy Lessons

While identifying some channels that could have beneficial effects, the authors emphasized that the short-term challenges arising from the Covid-19 crisis are serious, especially for single mothers and families lacking the ability 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 .