How This Pandemic Affects Mothers
By: Brigitte Pellerin
Tags: Work Life Balance, Pandemic, Mothers, Workforce, Women

Exhausted mama bears

Even in homes where there is no abuse, the people who suffer the most from the pandemic are the moms. This does not negate the suffering of others. It just highlights a salient issue that is not debated enough but should be. At least as much as how many dollars your local government will send you if you lose your job because of COVID-19.

There are exceptions of course but by and large it’s the moms who take on the mental work of keeping everyone organized. While performing well at work, overseeing the homeschooling, checking virtually on their friends and relatives, doing the grocery shopping for their elderly parents and making meals every goddamn day since restaurants don’t feel safe or fun anymore.

Did I mention how tired they are?

I want to cry because five months was all it took to undo three decades of progress. Since March, women’s participation in the workforce has declined to rates not seen since the 1980s.

The 1980s. Are you even old enough to remember that?

I was a teenager back then. And it wasn’t a picnic for women who wanted to join the workforce, especially if they were married and had children. My mother took some flack for getting a part-time job once her kids were teenagers and could be trusted to get themselves home and properly snacked after school. Back then, a real mother stayed home even if her children were old enough to have sex. Anything else was considered selfish, not just because it took jobs away from men but also because it took jobs away from unmarried women.

We have mostly moved past that, except in some pockets of backwards religiosity (but I repeat myself) where men still control the destiny of entire households. Today, if a mother prefers to stay home to look after her family and keep the house organized she is viewed as a person making a valid choice. Well, OK, there are nasty mommy-war blogs where criticism of stay-at-home moms is common, but since they display the same kind of blanket intolerance as bigoted religious men most of us over here in the real world do our best to ignore them.

Women do what they want even if that means not having a career outside the home to focus on family life or volunteerism or what have you. Others study and work in any field of their choosing, and even though they still don’t earn as much as men on average for comparable jobs, that gap is slowly closing. At least for white, college-educated women. We have big problems when it comes to hiring and properly paying people from marginalized groups, be they sexual minorities, Indigenous people, recent immigrants or persons whose skin is not white. We can comfort ourselves thinking that eventually the tide will lift all boats, but maybe it won’t. Still, we should cheer every bit of progress as it contributes to other bits of progress elsewhere.

It’s been a long, slow slog. And just like that, March happened and we’re back to the Stone Age.

When the pandemic hit North America, according to Time magazine, “women dropped from the workforce at a higher rate than men. Now, as the country begins to reopen, women are being re-employed at a slower rate than men – an early sign that the economic pain will last much longer for women.”

You know why this is happening, yeah?

It’s happening because in the absence of schools, camps or daycare, guess who in the family stays home to look after the children who are not old enough to be left on their own?

As a rule, it’s women, not men. At an individual level, maybe this makes sense. Quite possibly the dad’s job pays more or is more secure, or maybe it includes benefits such as health coverage, so that family would be crazy to say you know what? You go back to work, Mom, it’s OK we don’t need money or health coverage.

Or maybe Mom worked in a service job, and those aren’t coming back for some time. Maybe the choice isn’t really a choice after all. This, the not-having-a-choice part, appears to be especially true for women of colour, at least according to that same Time article. What does that tell you?

It tells you that despite decades of slow, gradual, painfully uneven improvement, despite the great strides individual women have made in the workplace, their position, in the aggregate, is incredibly fragile. The whole system is rigged against everyone who is not already privileged, white and male. Why do you think they’re the ones with the better-paying jobs that provide families with health coverage?

This is true in the U.S., in Canada, in Europe, in Australia, everywhere. Across income brackets parents in many countries find themselves hugely divided in the COVID-19 era; mothers as a rule do a lot more housework and childcare than fathers, while continuing to do their job from home.

In the spring we could look forward to things going back to normal maybe by September. We all thought the pandemic would be temporary. I know I did.

Boy, was that naive.

The way things are going, “temporary” is going to mean a lot more than five months. We are looking at a year, maybe more. Do you have any idea how fast the workplace changes in that timeframe, especially if you happen to be out of it because you just couldn’t do homeschooling, parenting, housework, and a job so you quit the latter?

Time, when you’re outside the workforce, passes you by at the speed of light. When I tried to find a job after being out of salaried employment for several years, it took me nearly 18 months to find something suited to my skills and talents. And while they are lovely and treat me well, the job I got was entry-level with the compensation package to match. I’m not complaining; I’m grateful to have found this neat job that includes great benefits. But there is no question I am worth more than I’m getting paid. I will claw my way back up to where I belong, but it’s going to take time. If I hadn’t left the workforce to homeschool my kids and launch my then-husband’s career, I would be in a very different place, professionally and financially, in 2020.

In a year or two from now, women who left the workforce in March 2020 will have lost their spot. They will have to start all over again.

I have no doubt they will do it. They will work harder than they ever have to earn a decent position for themselves.

But, say, why do we take for granted that of course they’ll have to do it?