Parents, especially mothers, paying heavy price for lockdown

School closures, massive rates of job loss and furloughing, and a shift to working from home are all affecting how parents spend their time, and how mothers and fathers divide responsibilities for paid work, housework and childcare, finds a new study co-led by UCL. Researchers from UCL Institute of Education (IOE) and the Institute for Fiscal Studies have specially designed an online survey, funded by the Nuffield Foundation and fielded between 29 April and 15 May, to capture how 3,500 families with two opposite-gender parents are paid work and domestic responsibilities. They found that mothers are more likely than fathers to have left paid work since February and among mothers and fathers who are still in paid work, mothers have seen a bigger proportional reduction in hours of work than fathers. The team also found that among those doing paid work at home, mothers are more likely than fathers to be spending their work hours simultaneously trying to care for children. The combined effect is that in lockdown, mothers in two-parent households are only doing, on average, a third of the uninterrupted paid-work hours of fathers. Before lockdown, mothers did around 60% of the uninterrupted work hours of fathers. This sharp reduction in the time that mothers are spending dedicated to paid work risks lasting harm to their careers when the lockdown is lifted. The survey also reveals the extent to which mothers have picked up the bulk of the time spent on new responsibilities for childcare and housework: they are looking after children during an average of 10.3 hours of the day (2.3 hours more than fathers), and are doing housework during 1.7 more hours than fathers.