How the Covid-19 Lockdown Affected Gender Inequality in Paid and Unpaid Work in Spain

By Ĺıdia Farré, Yarine Fawaz, Libertad González, J. Graves. Social Science Research Network, 2020

308 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The covid-19 pandemic led many countries to close schools and declare lockdowns during the Spring of 2020, with important impacts on the labor market. We document the effects of the covid-19 lockdown in Spain, which was hit early and hard by the pandemic and suffered one of the strictest lockdowns in Europe. We collected rich household survey data in early May of 2020. We document large employment losses during the lockdown, especially in "quarantined" sectors and non-essential sectors that do not allow for remote work. Employment losses were mostly temporary, and hit lower-educated workers particularly hard. Women were slightly more likely to lose their job than men, and those who remained employed were more likely to work from home. The lockdown led to a large increase in childcare and housework, given the closing of schools and the inability to outsource. We find that men increased their participation in housework and childcare slightly, but most of the burden fell on women, who were already doing most of the housework before the lockdown. Overall, we find that the covid-19 crisis appears to have increased gender inequalities in both paid and unpaid work in the short-term.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, General Health Professions

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2b0acf463a5ae5b5dc447e23f28b2b31ace28ac3

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Citations in the corpus

This Time It's Different: The Role of Women's Employment in a Pandemic Recession (2020, background): “Farré et al. (2020) document that in Spain, women have been more likely than men to lose their jobs during the pandemic.”
A literature review of the economics of COVID‐19 (2020, methodology): “For example, based on household surveys in Spain, Farré et al. (2020) find that while men increased their participation in household work and childcare duties during lockdowns, the burden of these tasks fell disproportionately on women.”
Gender inequality during the COVID-19 pandemic: Income, expenditure, savings, and job loss (2020, unknown): “Analyzing real-time surveys conducted between late March and mid-April in 12 countries, Foucault and Galasso (2020) find women to stop working more than men during the pandemic in various countries such as Austria, Canada, Germany, Italy, Poland and Sweden.”
Gender inequality in COVID-19 times: evidence from UK prolific participants (2020, background): “Similarly, Farré et al. (2020) document that most of the burden fell on women in Spain.”
Baby steps: the gender division of childcare during the COVID-19 pandemic (2020, result): “Our paper is most closely related to preliminary work by Farré et al. (2020).”
Women’s and men’s work, housework and childcare, before and during COVID-19 (2020, background): “Preliminary evidence from Spain (Farré et al. 2020) and from the UK (Sevilla and Smith 2020) 1 For further details see: http://www.protezionecivile.gov.it/documents/20182/1227694/Summary+of +measures+taken+against+the+spread+of+C-19/c16459ad-4e52-4e90-90f3-c6a2b30c17eb shows that there has been a…”
The virus changed everything, didn’t it? Couples’ division of housework and childcare before and during the Corona crisis (2020, background): “Moreover, it will be important to relate findings from Germany to such from other countries, like Italy or Spain (e.g., Del Boca et al. 2020; Farré et al. 2020), which were hit even more severely by the Corona crisis and might thus also experience more severe consequences.”
The impact of COVID-19 on gender inequality in the labor market and gender-role attitudes (2020, methodology): “While previous work has focused on these outcomes (Adams-Prassl et al. 2020; Collins et al. 2020; Cowan 2020; Farre et al. 2020; Frodermann et al. 2020; Kristal and Yaish 2020; Montenovo et al. 2020), no prior investigation considered and contrasted all three over the same sample for the countries w”