School closures and unpaid care work under Covid19

As the Covid19 pandemic spreads across the globe, many governments are closing schools entirely or replacing in-person education with distance learning that students do from home. In either case, hours a day that children used to spend at school in the care of paid teachers and other school personnel, they instead spend at home with parents and other family members.

With school closures and other large-scale disruptions, there is a clear need for data on how these closures impact unpaid care work and paid work in households. Those data will come when nationally representative time use surveys are fielded again to compare with those from before pandemic-related closures. In the meantime, CWW does have tools to help us estimate the scale of the impact. How much will adults’ unpaid care work increase due to time spent supervising children out of school?

Taking data from Education at a Glance: OECD Indicators, we estimate that students spent 22-26 hours per week in school during months when school is in session, depending on the level of schooling. For high school students, it is less likely that they will require adult supervision so we will estimate their time at only 13 hours per week.  Multiplying these estimates by the total numbers of children of each age by the hours per week estimated for their level of schooling gives us an aggregate amount of time shifted from schools to households.  If we assume that these hours are provided in the same proportion as childcare hours are provided now, we can use CWW’s estimate of childcare production by age and sex to distribute those hours to adults.

The results look like the figure below, for a set of 17 countries in the CWW project. Men are shown in the blue lines, women in the red. 

Hours per day of additional childcare due to school closures, for men in blue, for women in red. Some time may be supervisory and not direct interactive care. (Source: CWW estimates and OECD data on average schooling hours)

The increases fall mostly on women because they provide most of the direct care in these countries.  There is a wide range of potential increases for two reasons: 1. some countries have many children relative to the number of adult caregivers and some countries have fewer, and 2. some countries share caregiving responsibilities more evenly between men and women and more evenly over the age range.  At peak ages for childcare in Bangladesh and Senegal, school closures could result in more than three additional hours per day in childcare. In Spain and Colombia, it could be less than an hour per day.  Of course, this is averaging across parents and non-parents, as CWW estimates are averages across all persons of a particular age and sex.  Further exploration within each country would be needed to find the impact per parent instead of per adult.

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Unpaid care work and Covid19 - TAKE THE SURVEY

The front door is an important border in the gendered economy. A “traditional” division of labor since industrialization is men working outside the home at market work and women inside the home doing unpaid care and housework. In reality, men and women do both types of work, but in every country for which Counting Women’s Work has estimates, on average men do more market work than women and women do more unpaid care work than men. Will this persist in the face of massive dislocations caused by the coronavirus pandemic? We do not know.

Shelter in place, social distancing, lockdown. Whatever it is called in your area, government orders to slow the spread of the coronavirus have upended daily life for billions. Most of us are being asked to retreat to our households. Will we see the gendered economy differently when it no longer hides behind a door?

Counting Women’s Work has developed a survey to study how paid and unpaid work has changed in this new era. We invite you to take the survey, then share it with family, friends, and colleagues. It gives respondents the chance to be heard about how their household is coping with all kinds of work changes:

• Have you or your spouse or partner lost paid employment? Or is your work considered “essential” and you are working longer hours than ever? Would you rather stay home but cannot afford to go without a paycheck?

• Are you spending more hours on childcare in the face of school and childcare closures?

• Are you doing tasks that you used to purchase from restaurants, housecleaners, or other service providers?

• Is the work in your household being shared more evenly or less?

• What do YOU want to say about work in and out of the household in this new, uncertain time?

The survey is anonymous and participation voluntary. We will publish preliminary results here once 500 responses have been gathered and will continue to update results as the sample size grows. The survey is in English, but CWW would be happy to have collaborators translate the survey instrument and use it in other countries. Feel free to leave comments or questions below, or contact Gretchen Donehower, the Principal Investigator of Counting Women’s Work.