'Mothers, Covid 19 and Work At Home'

[Thelnebriati]

The Women and Equalities Committee asked for evidence of the impact on women. Dr Jim Reid produced a report 'Mothers, Covid 19 and Work At Home' and has presented it to the committee.

''COVID-19 and the lockdown have had a disproportionate impact on women, who have been more than twice as likely as men to experience mental health problems, exacerbated by the challenge of working at home while taking on extra responsibilities such as home schooling.

As a result, gender equality gains have quickly dissolved, according to a University of Huddersfield researcher. His findings will be presented to a Parliamentary committee that focuses on inequalities and could influence future legislation designed to contain the pandemic. ''

www.hud.ac.uk/news/2020/september/women-bear-the-brunt-of-covid-and-lockdown/

Full report here;
huddersfield.app.box.com/s/vpauiaqjtbbgioue75picmjwwhjx47ab

Thank you! Will read this properly later. Not a shock though - I was just talking to my 15 year old daughter about how it seems to be 99% mums sorting things out around kids being sent home from school.

Quick bump for the weekend.

Thanks for the bump. It was a thread I had meant to read and then got distracted.

I'm bumping. I think this is a really important issue.

Thanks for this. I'm lucky dp works from home anyway, but I've seen this play out in a lot of friends' families.

Thanks for that. Very sad reading. I'm fortunate to be in a relationship where we have a pretty balanced split of "work", and I think I sometimes naively assume this is the norm.

A fair split should be the norm, of course it should, but Covid has been the litmus test that shows how unbalanced things still are, even in 2020.

I have been so happy to see DS and DDiL pulling together as a team and managing home-schooling DGC1 with one full-time WAH job and a lockdown DGC2. It certainly helps to have a workspace that isn't the sitting or dining room or bedroom, and a garden for the older child to leap about in. The only bit they haven't shared is bf the baby - and the actual paid job content, too, of course.

It can be done without anyone burning out, just about, but both partners need to have each others' backs.

Look for an uptick in divorces when we eventually emerge as women shed the 'deadweight' husbands who couldn't or didn't step up to the challenge

Bumping.

A depressing (but predictable) read. I am phenomenally lucky in that my employer is very understanding - I just about went under trying to home school back in the summer.

Pregnant then screwed have done some research on the topic and (shock!) found similar.

A-yup. Lived this. Husband suddenly working from home, me working outside the home in a stressful job and studying too. Burden of household management still mine, still emotionally supporting kids, trying to deal with technical connection issues for all of us, and having to find space for them all to have relatively uninterrupted study, which has meant my study time has shifted to very late evenings because that's the only chance I get to use the table. It's been exceptionally challenging.

Thanks for posting this is so interesting. Such a shame.

We get treated how we allow ourselves to be treated a lot of the time. Having children will always be more of a risk to women. If you do go ahead you need to be crystal clear about your expectations.

Don't have children with someone who doesn't pull their weight. If you do, don't then have a second!!!

Thank you for posting OP, looking forward to reading this report. So many women in the same boat.

The outcome is, as others have pointed out, utterly predictable, given the existing sex norms and roles which have both men and most women working for money but which still implicitly assign care-giving and housework (or at least the management and organising of them) to women.

The system works in more ordinary times for many (though not for all) because schools and day care help with child care and cleaning etc. services can be hired. But the pandemic broke those support systems, and then the underlying norms become operative again.

Individual solutions obviously do work in that the partners can share everything more equally if they wish. But when the problem is basically structural the solutions might have to be that, too.

@BewilderedDoughnut

We get treated how we allow ourselves to be treated a lot of the time. Having children will always be more of a risk to women. If you do go ahead you need to be crystal clear about your expectations.

Don't have children with someone who doesn't pull their weight. If you do, don't then have a second!!!

If it makes you feel better to think that way its your problem, don't bring it to this thread. You can be as clear as you like about your expectations, bottom line is that you can't force other people to act the way you want.

You can be as clear as you like about your expectations, bottom line is that you can't force other people to act the way you want

No. But you can choose not to have multiple (or any) children with useless partners. Doing so literally clips the wings of so many women. Without the children, women have much more bargaining power and leaving is of course easier.

Often, though, partners don't show themselves to be useless until the children are there. It's easy enough to put on the odd load of washing, empty the dishwasher from time to time, do a bit of cooking when there's no other demands on your time of an evening, remember to take the bins out when there's just two of you.

But the increase in washing that comes with a baby, the extra house tidying that comes with a boisterous toddler, trying to make a meal when all hell is breaking loose because early evening is the witching hour for colic...

That's the point at which many men opt out. And because someone has to look after the child, make sure it's fed, make sure the house isn't an unsanitary shit heap, women pick up the load.

Sure there are some lovely men out there who do their fair share. But there are some disaster areas too. And the big problem for women is that they don't conveniently come with a bar code saying "this one's a good 'un, that one will turn into a work-shy waste of space when the going gets tough."

It's all very well saying "don't choose to have children with a useless partner", but without a crystal ball you simply don't know (barring the few cases where they're useless tossers from the outset).

My husband is a pretty good one. Nowadays we're proper 50/50 with household task (and taking time off work to look after the kids). But it wasn't always so. In fact he sort of "regressed" when we first had kids. And he occasionally regresses again when the inlaws are around. Literally starts acting more like a goofy teenager, less like a proper adult. And I'm left as the sole grown up in charge.
It's like flicking a switch. Very bizarre.

We had words. I had to point out very sternly what I was doing, and what he was doing, and how that wasn't remotely OK. He agreed, and changed. But that was hard work.

I'm not sure what makes guys act like that. I didn't put up with it, but I didn't expect it. All I can remember is that when our first child was born, suddenly all the previous established norms in our relationship got redefined, and I ended up having to deal with all the household crap. Felt a bit like the Stanford Prison Experiment, to be honest. Like the situation, the environment, was creating ready-made role into which we were falling inexorably.
In my opinion, it started in the labour ward... I had never felt "gendered" societal pressure so badly since I'd been a teen, and it came from the nurses and midwives.