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Why Moms (and Non-Moms) Have Had Enough
Invisible labor at home and work make this time particularly trying for women
The bombshell from a recent New York Times survey probably didn’t come as much of a surprise to working moms juggling Zoom calls and math worksheets: In straight American couples with kids under 12, nearly half of men claimed that they were shouldering most of their children’s homeschooling duties. Only 3% of women agreed.
As the coronavirus lockdown drags along, parents around the world are not alright, buckling under the demands of educating their children and doing their jobs, all in a climate of uncertainty and fear.
Meanwhile, some childless remote workers — stuck at home without a hard stop to the workday — are logging long hours, panic-working, and sometimes picking up the slack for overtaxed parents. There’s no data yet, but given what we know about the “invisible labor” that women perform at work, as well as at home, this group is also likely to skew female.
The times are trying. But, as many predicted early in the crisis, they’re largely more trying for women — single and married, with or without children — than men.
There are several reasons for this. First of all, the drudgery of domestic labor — overwhelmingly, disproportionately, and often invisibly — tends to fall to women. This is not a fluke; it’s the logical, inevitable byproduct of an economic system that was designed to run on the free or cheap labor of women. We are meant to take a woman’s work for granted. It’s the whole point of the setup.
Housework, the management of household schedules and budgets, grocery shopping, and tending to elderly relatives and children are largely invisible to economists. But if American women were paid the minimum wage for all these unpaid hours of work, they would have made roughly $1.5 trillion last year, Gus Wezerek and Kristen R. Ghodsee wrote in a recent New York Times op-ed: “Societies rarely take stock of the value of unpaid care work unless there is a disruption in the supply,” they wrote, citing the time in 1975 when 90% of Icelandic women refused to cook, clean, or look after children for a day, forcing men to fill in.
