Women did three times as much childcare as men during coronavirus pandemic

 Women took on 173 additional hours of unpaid child care last year, compared to 59 additional hours for men, study says.

Child care demands at home skyrocketed during the pandemic, but men and women did not split the burden equally. Globally, women took on 173 additional hours of unpaid child care last year, compared to 59 additional hours for men, a study released Friday by the Center for Global Development, a poverty non-profit, found. The gap widened in low- and middle-income countries, where women cared for children for more than three times as many hours as men did.

Women have felt many of the pandemic’s worst economic effects, including an estimated $800 billion in lost income, in large part due to increased demands on their time at home. The Covid-19 recession unraveled gains in pay equality, female labor force participation and unemployment, particularly among Black and Latina women in the U.S. Global job loss rates among women were roughly 1.8 times larger than those among men, according to a McKinsey & Co. estimate. And as U.S. workers return to the office, mothers are more likely than fathers and women without kids to stay out of work.

Charles Kenny, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development and one of the study’s authors, said the pandemic merely exposed existing gender disparities. Child care duties falls on women three times more than men during pandemic “Every year, year in year out, there are trillions of hours of unpaid care work being done, the considerable majority by women,” he said. “We are not going to get to a world that sees gender equality until that burden is more evenly shared.”