Remote work has exposed the inequality of mothers

“Yes, I have everything,” we say. Or maybe I just do everything? It’s hard to know when you’re being pelted with Legos and splattered with yogurt as you type.

Before the pandemic, the average dad probably missed out on the daily mess of toys strewn all over the living room, the fish fingers rubbed in the carpet, the twice-daily vacuuming sessions, and the thrice-daily ritual of the washed, dirty, and laundered outfit.

In 2020, when nurseries and schools closed and everyone started working from home (at least those who weren’t considered essential workers and still had a job), the value of this unpaid work became apparent.

In homes across the country, fathers have seen for the first time just how much unseen and unpaid work goes into keeping a family and home running. Lockdown pressed their faces against the unwashed cereal bowls, the towels on the bathroom floor, and the endless diaper changes in a way that had never been done before.

After International Workers’ Day, it is important to note that nothing has changed.

A study entitled How are Mothers and Fathers Balancing Work and Family under Lockdown, published by the Institute for Fiscal Studies and University College London, found that mothers still did disproportionately more housework and childcare than fathers. This was the case even in lockdown when both were at home and even when both were working full-time.

A new survey conducted by jobs website Indeed has found that more than a third of women have considered quitting their job in the past 12 months, citing burnout and the pressures of family life.

You see, it’s always women, not men, who take wage cuts and short-time work, who constantly switch from full-time to part-time. It’s women who spend years accumulating degrees and promotions only to fall down the career ladder after having children.

According to Indeed, the issue of work-life balance was particularly felt by the cohort of women most likely to have young children — aged 35 to 44 — with 37 percent of this group finding that juggling career and family responsibilities propelled her career off a cliff face.

A new Deloitte report has similarly found that despite changing work regulations and a rise in hybrid work, working women face alarmingly high rates of burnout. The study shows that 53 percent of women say their stress levels are higher than they were a year ago, and nearly half feel burned out.

According to the study by the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission and the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI), Ireland had the third highest number of weekly unpaid hours worked for men and women in the EU in 2019.

If you’re not already angry enough, here’s some more depressing information: Globally, women’s unpaid labor is worth at least $11 trillion annually. That’s three times the size of the global tech industry.

Housework and labor work? After that, dinner, bath time, and work putting the kids to bed? If all of that is in the new normal then I fear that gender equality will be one of the most disastrous casualties of Covid.

Compared to many low-income women and women in service industries, middle-class mothers who have the luxury of working from home are in a privileged position. But that doesn’t mean we don’t burn out every day.

Only when we see every mother as a working mother, whether she is in her own household or working, will we stop asking women to work a second shift. It’s only when we look at raising a family as the full-time job of a stay-at-home parent that we realize the need to divide cleaning and cooking evenly between moms and dads.