Claire Song, a web designer in Hoboken, New Jersey, spent a lot of time at home working last week. Her husband, who works as a chief engineer at a shipping company, also works from home in what has become their new normal. But since COVID-19 has changed the landscape of work spaces - and the time that they spend using the house, it hasn’t changed her role there. She is in charge of cooking three times a day, doing laundry twice a week, and vacuuming every other day.
“Definitely, I have more daily chores these days,” said Song. “One thing that hasn't changed: I’m the one who’s taking more time for domestic work.” But Song is not the only woman who is spending more time on household chores under the country's widespread stay-at-home orders.
A survey of 1,060 parents in different-sex couples from the Council on Contemporary Families found that although men were doing more housework in April, women still did more of the domestic work and 70% of women were solely responsible for education or homeschooling for their children. Another survey for the New York Times found that 80% of women reported doing most or all of the housework and homeschooling.
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Lockdowns amidst the coronavirus have forced many to work from home. Because schools are closed, parents have become teachers and playmates for their children, on top of working full time. But the burdens of cooking, cleaning and childcare tend to fall on women in heterosexual couples.
“This is a total disaster to moms like me,” said Stella Wayne, who works as an executive assistant at a tax account office in Orlando, Florida and a mother of two. She said that she had talked to friends, also mothers, who were juggling childcare and work at home after children stopped going to school. Because she said she is better at cooking and cleaning than her husband, she usually manages more household affairs than her husband or her two children. “My husband helps me to manage all the things, but literally, he helps. [It’s] not sharing.”
OECD data has already shown that women in the United States spend 1.6 times more than men for unpaid work. Men spend about 17.5 hours a week on it compared to women, who spend about 28.4 hours a week on this unpaid labor. The United Nations also reported that women do 2.6 times more unpaid domestic work and caregiving than men - chances are, these numbers will be even more skewed toward women in the months to come.
