Abstract
ABSTRACT Women’s lives have been affected exponentially by the COVID_19 pandemic. In this paper, we explore some of the ways in which women’s everyday experiences of paid and unpaid labour have exacerbated pre-existing gender inequalities. We examine the impact that the pandemic has had on women’s experiences within the domestic sphere, as hyper-normative and historical representations of women as the ‘natural’ primary carers for children and the home have resurfaced. For many, this has led to an almost unbearable pressure to provide full-time domestic care while simultaneously holding down paid work. Drawing on theoretical feminist debate, which has emphasised the importance of intersectional approaches to gender, the paper shows how the fusion of domestic worlds and public lives has brought domestic issues and challenges to the fore and has meant that women’s participation in paid work has been disproportionately affected by the pandemic in a number of ways. Women have an increased likelihood of, first, furlough and redundancy; second, of working in ‘high-risk’ jobs; third, of experiencing poverty; and fourth, of bearing the brunt of domestic labour and childcare intensified during the pandemic. Written by both an academic and practicing full-time politician, it offers a unique perspective on this subject.
Highlights
On 23 March 2020, the British Prime Minister Boris Johnson in a very rare public service broadcast made an address to the nation
We show how the pandemic has featured a show of renewed gendered visibility within the domestic sphere including numerous hyper-normative representa tions of women and housework of the type reflected in earlier studies
Pre-existing norms have sometimes been turned on their heads, particu larly as we have seen around the traditional de-coupling of domestic and public spheres
Summary
As well as paid employment and home-schooling other unpaid work around the home that took place during the furlough period included DIY projects, making sourdough bread/baking and major decluttering during lockdown During this time, there was a rapid increase in popularity of online home, cleaning and childrearing accounts on Instagram and TikTok, most often created by, featuring and followed by women (Casey & Littler, forthcoming). When deaths in care-homes were reported, the adult social care sector – characterised by profoundly precarious conditions, a low-wage generally flat pay structure and unusually run via private companies yet commissioned through local authorities – was illuminated as never before Following on from his earlier theorising on the sociology of risk and individualisation, Beck (1992) wrote of the ‘Brazilianization of work,’ in which workforce participants enter in and out of formal and informal employment mirroring wider changes in contemporary culture and society. In Summer 2020, the double murder of Mina Smallman and Biba Henry two sisters in a park in the suburban London borough of Brent was another shocking seemingly misogynistic homicide where the police were found to be at fault during the chain of events
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