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Why Quarantine Could — But Won’t — Change Gender Roles at Home
You’re more likely to find a 12-pack of hand sanitizer at Rite Aid
When my daughter’s school announced in March it was closing over coronavirus fears, her classmates' moms immediately started texting each other to share thoughts and tips for getting through the weeks ahead. They knew that the burden of providing childcare would mostly fall on their shoulders, on top of the grocery shopping, soap buying, and all the other domestic work they were already handling.
With no children’s camps in sight for this summer and uncertainty about what schools will do come September, women who normally function as the family’s primary caregiver, cook, shopper, and housekeeper—in addition to their full-time jobs—could see their newly unforgiving workload stretching well into the foreseeable future.
Should that happen, the pandemic is set to have an unprecedented impact on gender roles in America—widening an already monumental labor gap at home at a time when women have been doing more in the workforce than ever.
Some journalists and academics are a lot more optimistic than I am that Covid-19 will actually force more men to take on domestic responsibilities because of the disproportionate number of women holding essential jobs. With more women working as grocery store clerks, teachers, nurses, pharmacists, and respiratory therapists, the idea is that men—now home more than ever—will have to start pitching in more around the house. Economists from Northwestern University and the University of California San Diego even think we may see a cultural shift around gender roles like the one after World War II when millions of women entered the labor force to take jobs in factories and other workplaces to replace male employees off at war. That shift, they note, forever changed women’s work participation in this country. They think that because of Covid-19, fathers will become the primary childcare providers in a large number of families across the United States and that, in turn, will change social norms “towards more equality in the provision of child care and house work.”
As nice as that sounds, a cultural shift that favors women in this country is about as…
