Optimists hope that covid-19 will lead to a more equitable distribution of household chores, as a result of men taking on more of the burden at home during lockdowns
of the covid-19 pandemic has been social distancing, another has been enforced intimacy. More than half of humanity has been confined to their homes at one time or another since the start of the outbreak. Many children have seen more of their parents and siblings than ever before; partners have had to negotiate new ways of juggling work and household chores; older, vulnerable relatives have been cut off.
Yet even though families have been moulded by long-run forces, big external shocks have the power to alter their path. Pandemics, wars and particularly deep recessions have all left a lasting mark on the family unit. Might this one do the same? Big external shocks can cause births to spike as well as deaths. According to “Pale Rider”, Laura Spinney’s book on the flu of 1918, a big rebound in fertility which took place across Europe in 1920 was attributed by many to soldiers returning home from the first world war. But a baby boom in neutral Norway points to a different explanation—that the pandemic both delayed pregnancies and left a healthier child-rearing population in its wake.
But within individual families, norms shifted. Using data from that period, Raquel Fernandez of New York University, Alessandra Fogli of University of Minnesota Twin Cities and Claudia Olivetti of Boston College have shown that the wives of men whose mothers worked are themselves much more likely to be in the labour force. Rosie the Riveter did not just change the wartime workforce, but the attitudes of her sons, too.
. Even limited increases in men’s involvement in child care can affect attitudes. A paper by Lídia Farré of the University of Barcelona and Libertad González of Universitat Pompeo Fabra showed that the introduction of two weeks’ paternity leave in Spain in 2007 lengthened the time it took for couples to have an additional child, partly because men did not want another baby. The risk is that the pandemic does as much to cement conventional roles within families as to dissolve them.
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