How is the response to coronavirus affecting gender equality?

Equal Lives PI Susan Harkness has produced a blog for the Economics Observatory about widening inequality between men and women during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In it she explains that while men and women’s employment has suffered, mothers have been hit harder than fathers or those without children.

Reviewing some key research to have emerged in the last few months, she concludes that while the impact of the coronavirus crisis on men and women’s employment prospects has not been strongly gendered, it us a different story for parents, particularly mothers.

Single mothers, she says are among the most disadvantaged by the pandemic and given that the one-in-four families with children headed by single parents were already among the most economically disadvantaged, the response to the pandemic is likely to have pushed up rates of worklessness and child poverty among this group.