Coronavirus pandemic could wipe out 25 years of increasing gender equality, new data from UN suggests

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Economic and domestic turmoil caused by the Covid-19 pandemic could wipe out 25 years of increasing gender equality, new United Nations data suggests.

Lockdowns, job losses, school closures and dwindling income from the coronavirus have seen women take on significantly greater shares of housework and childcare.

Employment and education opportunities are likely to be lost and women may suffer from poorer mental and physical health. 

"Everything we worked for, that has taken 25 years, could be lost in a year," the UN Women deputy executive director Anita Bhatia told the BBC.

Women’s new burden of care posed a "real risk of reverting to 1950s gender stereotypes", she said.

Women already conducted most of the unpaid care and domestic chores in the world before the arrival of the pandemic, but that proportion has now risen further, research found.

The research found that women on average did three times as much of such work as men before the pandemic, though figures varied from 1.8 times as much in the UK, and 1.4 times as much in Canada, to 9.2 times as much in Egypt.

"If it was more than three times as much as men before the pandemic, I assure you that number has at least doubled," said Ms Bhatia.

"More alarming is the fact that many women are actually not going back to work," says Ms Bhatia.

"In the month of September alone, in the US, something like 865,000 women dropped out of the labour force compared to 200,000 men, and most of that can be explained by the fact that there was a care burden and there’s nobody else around," she said.

Campaigners have warned that the effects of the pandemic are increasing existing inequalities and women and girls are bearing a disproportionate amount of the impact.

A survey released in September by the aid charity Care International found that 55 per cent of women respondents reported losing their job or income, and were 60 per cent more likely than men to report that this was one of Covid-19’s biggest impacts on their life.

Women were more likely to have jobs in service and informal sectors, which have been particulary hard hit by coronavirus lockdowns and restrictions. But even in the formal sector the virus seems to be widening inequality, the report found, with women in Bangladesh six times more likely to lose paid working hours than men.