Column
Women Will Bear the Burden of Getting Our Aging Parents Vaccinated
Just as we’ve been doing the bulk of the childcare
When New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced this week that the state would start making the Covid-19 vaccine available to people over 65 years old, my first reaction was relief. The news meant my parents, both of whom are in their mid-seventies, would finally get some sort of assurance in the near future. The second feeling I had was one of pure and overwhelming exhaustion, because I knew I was about to spend countless hours trying to help my mom and dad schedule those vaccination appointments.
I’m far from alone. American women, who overwhelmingly are tasked with caretaking for senior parents, now have another huge responsibility added to their already very full plate of child rearing and domestic work.
The pandemic over the past year has hit women in this country particularly hard: Women are losing their jobs at a much higher rate than their male counterparts — between August and September of 2020, nearly 1 million American women left the workforce. And those who are still working are likely to be working less; one study showed that mothers who remain in the labor force had reduced their working hours up to five times more than men. Lost jobs, lost hours, lost…
