This Covid Christmas Will Leave Women More Burned Out Than Ever
With women in heterosexual relationships typically taking on extra domestic and emotional labour at Christmas, the 2020 holiday season is shaping up to leave women more burned out than ever.
This year has already seen the added load of housework and caring during lockdowns falling mostly on women.
In those first few months of lockdown, when childcare and education, normal paid work and every meal – as well as the extra tidying and cleaning – moved inside, numerous studies showed that, in heterosexual cohabiting relationships, most of this extra care has fallen on women, with women still spending an average of 15 hours more on domestic and caring duties each week than men.
Particularly for couples with young children, this tends to be seen as a fair division. Ask men whether they split household chores equally and they’ll often claim either that they do, or that their wives and girlfriends take on more because he undertakes (more) paid work outside the home.
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In many cases though, household inequalities brought on by lockdowns are due to the same wider economic forces that have always seen women in heterosexual relationships do more of the housework. We still have a gender wage gap, which typically makes women the lower earner in relationships, in turn making women more likely to be the one to drop out of the paid workforce or take a pay cut.
My husband claims that I do more around the house because he “doesn’t care” whether our home is as clean and tidy as I like it to be. In the before times, I would often be greeted at my friends’ and sisters’ homes with “excuse the mess!| (regardless of the actual mess levels), a phrase rarely heard when their male partners answered the door.
We don’t have children yet,...
