Children and COVID-19 Research Library

UNICEF Innocenti's curated library of COVID-19 + Children research

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Journal article

Gender roles, parenthood, and the ethics of care in pandemic media narratives pre- and post-Covid-19

AUTHOR(S)
Raffaella Baccolini; Chiara Xausa

Published: January 2023 Journal: European Journal of English Studies

Crises have always brought along transformations in gender identities, roles, and relations: while much has changed in Western culture regarding the role of women and notions of masculinity are also challenged, efforts to control female roles, bodies, and sexualities persist. For example, Susan Faludi’s The Terror Dream has described the post-9/11 age as an era of reconstituted “traditional” manhood, redomesticated femininity and nuclear family “togetherness.” The question that lies at the basis of this paper is whether – and if so, how –science fiction cinema continues to respond to moments of crisis and vulnerability through the old myth of protective manhood and feminine weakness. By identifying two cases of insecurity – climate change and the coronavirus pandemic – this study analyses a recent film (Bird Box, 2018) and two TV series on pandemic outbreaks from the US (Sweet Tooth, 2021) and Italy (Anna, 2021). All three works break new ground – though not devoid of limits – about family structures and parental care: while Bird Box proposes a reversal of gender roles, Anna elaborates on the notion of motherhood by presenting unconventional models of mothering; in Sweet Tooth, the ethics of care is extended to the relationship between humans, animals, and the endangered environment.

Journal article

Who is doing the chores and childcare in dual-earner couples during the COVID-19 era of working from home?

AUTHOR(S)
Sabrina Wulff Pabilonia; Victoria Vernon

Published: January 2023 Journal: Review of Economics of the Household

In 2020–21, parents’ work-from-home days increased three-and-a-half-fold following the initial COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns compared to 2015–19. At the same time, many schools offered virtual classrooms and daycares closed, increasing the demand for household-provided childcare. Using weekday workday time diaries from American Time Use Survey and looking at parents in dual-earner couples, this study examines parents’ time allocated to paid work, chores, and childcare in the COVID-19 era by the couple’s joint work location arrangements. It determines the work location of the respondent directly from their diary and predicts the partner’s work-from-home status.

Journal article

Parents' work arrangements and gendered time use during the COVID-19 pandemic

AUTHOR(S)
Thomas Lyttelton; Emma Zang; Kelly Musick

Published: December 2022 Journal: Journal of Marriage and Family

This study uses time diaries to examine how parents' work arrangements shaped their time use at home and work during the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic transformed home and work life for parents, disrupting employment and childcare. The shift to work from home offered more flexibility to manage increased care burdens, but the lack of separation between work and family also likely contributed to more challenging work environments, especially among mothers. This study relies on the 2017–2020 American Time Use Survey and matching to estimate changes in time use among parents working from home and on site in the pandemic relative to comparable parents prior to the pandemic.

Journal article

Younger women had more access to COVID-19 information: an intersectional analysis of factors influencing women and girls' access to COVID-19 information in Rohingya and host communities in Bangladesh

AUTHOR(S)
Ateeb Ahmad Parray; Muhammad Riaz Hossain; Rafia Sultana (et al.)

Published: December 2022 Journal: Plos Global Public Health

The Rohingya and Bangladeshi host communities live at a heightened risk of COVID-19 impact due to their pre-existing vulnerabilities, religious beliefs, and strict socio-cultural and gender norms that render primarily women and girls vulnerable. However, the extent of this vulnerability varies within and across population groups in the host and Rohingya communities. The intersectionality lens helps identify, recognize, and understand these factors that create inequities within populations. This study explored the factors that influenced the women and girls’ access to information during the COVID-19 pandemic through an intersectional lens. This paper presents partial findings from the exploratory qualitative part of mixed-method research conducted in ten Rohingya camps and four wards of the adjacent host communities in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. Data were extracted from 24 in-depth interviews (12 in each community) conducted from November 2020 to March 2021 with diverse participants, including adolescent girls, younger women, adult women, pregnant and lactating mothers, persons with disabilities, older adults, and single female-household heads.

Journal article

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on female academics with young children in South Africa

AUTHOR(S)
Samantha Kriger; Cyrill Walters; Armand Bam (et al.)

Published: December 2022 Journal: SOTL in the South

Against the backdrop of an increase in research on the effects of COVID-19, this article uses the analysis of survey data of female academics from the 26 higher education institutions in South Africa to identify how female academics with young children coped with academic output during the pandemic-enforced lockdown. A growing body of research documents the influence of children and childcare on the careers of female academics. In this article, we see how female academics who stayed at home during the enforced lockdown period negotiated childcare and home-schooling, and how the lockdown influenced their academic output. An online survey questionnaire was administered, consisting of 12 Likert-scale questions followed by an open-ended section that solicited a narrative account of academic work and home life during the lockdown period. Data on female academics with children under the age of six years was extracted for this study. The quantitative and qualitative data that emerged from our study of 2,018 women academics at 26 universities across South Africa describes how academic mothers felt, and how they struggled to complete the academic work required by their educational institutions. Such academic work directly influences future career prospects. This study highlights the influence that the presence of young children in the home, the pressures of home-schooling, traditional gender roles, and household responsibilities have on the academic careers of women.

Journal article

Gender differences in epidemic everyday scenarios: an exploratory study of family life in Slovenia

AUTHOR(S)
Alenka Švab; Tanja Oblak Črnič

Published: November 2022 Journal: Social Inclusion

The article focuses on the changed dynamics of family life due to the first wave of Covid-19—starting in the spring of 2020—and the consequent longstanding social lockdown in the fall of 2020. It employs the concept of “forced nuclearisation” to describe the process that required a rapid reorganisation of otherwise self-evident and established social patterns and relationships, above all new adjustments of care relations both inside and outside the private sphere. The focus is on new demands in the intertwined spheres of work, school, and family obligations, especially because the private sphere has been assigned several additional functions, otherwise carried out by educational and daycare institutions. Based on an extensive dataset from a quantitative exploratory online survey conducted in two time periods, first in April 2020 and then in October 2020, this article discusses, from a comparative perspective and with a focus on gender inequalities, the main changes in practices and everyday routines such as shopping, housework, childcare, work obligations, and caring for other family members. The research aimed to identify the most obvious distinctions in family scenarios and, in particular, to point to the main social inequalities and potentially vulnerable groups within the population, who faced the forced and unexpected nuclearisation of everyday life.

Journal article

Troubling gender norms on Mumsnet: working from home and parenting during the UK's first COVID lockdown

AUTHOR(S)
Karen Maria Handley

Published: November 2022 Journal: Gender, Work & Organization

This article examines the troubling of gender norms that unfolded on the social networking site, Mumsnet, at the beginning of the UK's first lockdown response to the COVID pandemic. Using an analysis of 7144 contributions which included the acronym ‘WFH’ (=working from home), posted from March 1, 2020 to April 5, 2020, the article examines how Mumsnet members talked about working from home while caring for toddlers and home-schooled children. Mumsnet discussions about everyday moral dilemmas create a discursive space for examining the situated rationalities and normative judgments that shape expectations of how to behave as a working parent. Drawing on post-structuralist discourse theory, the article shows how Mumsnet contributors generated alternative sub-categorizations of ‘good mums’, and destabilized discourse assumptions of intensive motherhood, such as always ‘being there’ for their children, thereby ‘working the weakness in the norms’ (Butler, 1993) and creating potential for change.

Cite this research | Open access | No. of pages: 16 | Language: English | Topics: Social Protection, Well-being and Equity | Tags: COVID-19 response, ethnic minorities, gender equality, gender roles, lockdown, parent-child relationship, social distance, social norms, working mothers | Countries: United Kingdom

Journal article

Nonconforming gender expression and insufficient sleep among adolescents during COVID-19 school closure and after school reopening

AUTHOR(S)
Qiguo Lian; Chaohua Lou; Xiangyang Zhong (et al.)

Published: November 2022 Journal: BMC Public Health

Gender nonconformity (GNC) (i.e., gender expression that differs from gender role expectations for feminine or masculine appearance and behavior) is an under-researched area of adolescent sleep health. The COVID-19 lockdown offers an opportunity to understand how the effect of GNC on adolescent health outcomes changes between school closure and reopening. This cross-sectional study was conducted in Shanghai, China, in 2020. The sample size for analysis was 3,265. The age-specific insufficient sleep was estimated according to National Sleep Foundation's sleep duration recommendations.

Cite this research | Open access | No. of pages: 8 | Language: English | Topics: Social Protection, Well-being and Equity, Mental Health | Tags: adolescent psychology, adolescent well-being, COVID-19 response, gender roles, lockdown, mental health services, mental stress, psychological distress, social distance | Countries: China

Research Report

Real choices real lives: Latin America

Institution: Plan International
Published: October 2022

This report, focusing on evidence from Brazil, Dominican Republic, and El Salvador, forms part of Plan International’s ongoing research, Real Choices, Real Lives – a qualitative, longitudinal study following the lives of girls living in nine countries* around the world from their birth (in 2006), until they turn 18 (in 2024). Through annual data collection, Real Choices, Real Lives captures unique insights into what it means to grow up as a girl across different contexts, including how families and communities shape expectations of what girls can do, and be, right from the moment they are born.

Cite this research | No. of pages: 28 | Language: English | Topics: Child Protection, Social Protection, Well-being and Equity | Tags: adolescent girls, COVID-19 response, education of girls, gender equality, gender roles, lockdown, social distance, social inequality | Publisher: Plan International

Journal article

"Having a family is the new normal": parenting in neoliberal academia during the COVID‐19 pandemic

AUTHOR(S)
Thais França; Filipa Godinho; Beatriz Padilla (et al.)

Published: August 2022 Journal: Gender, Work & Organization

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has made explicit the burden of care shouldered by academic mothers, in addition to juggling their scholarly commitments. Although discussions are abundant on the impact of caring responsibilities on the careers of women academics, neoliberal academia continues to minimize such struggles. Despite the disruptions to family routines caused by the health crisis, academic institutions have expected academic mothers and fathers to continue undertaking their professional responsibilities at the same level as before, disregarding their parenting demands. This paper contributes to the research on parenthood in academia by looking at how, throughout the pandemic, academic parents have negotiated the tensions between parenthood and academic demands, and by investigating the strategies they use to confront neoliberal culture of academic performativity, even amid the health crisis. The paper engages with the “space invaders” concept used by Puwar (2004) to analyze the “hypervisibility” of academic mothers' and fathers' “bodies out of place” during the pandemic, and to investigate their “renegade acts” against the uncaring attitudes of their institutions. Evidence is drawn from a qualitative study conducted during December 2020 and January 2021 among scholars affiliated to Portuguese academic institutions: 17 in-depth interviews conducted with women, and two mixed-gender focus groups.

Cite this research | Open access | No. of pages: 17 | Language: English | Topics: Social Protection, Well-being and Equity | Tags: COVID-19 response, gender equality, gender roles, lockdown, pandemic, parent-child relationship, parental responsibility, social distance, social inequality | Countries: Portugal

Journal article

Work and family disadvantage: determinants of gender gaps in paid work during the COVID-19 pandemic

AUTHOR(S)
Yasmin A. Mertehikian; Pilar Gonalons-Pons

Published: August 2022 Journal: Socius

This article provides a comprehensive analysis of the increase in gender inequality in paid work during the pandemic to unpack the relative relevance of labor market and work-family conflict processes. Using panel data from the United States Current Population Survey, we examine four mechanisms in an integrated analysis that explicitly includes singleparent households and assesses the moderating role of women’s economic position relative to their partners.

Journal article

COVID-19 and gender gaps in employment, wages, and work hours: lower inequalities and higher motherhood penalty

AUTHOR(S)
Maryna Tverdostup

Published: August 2022 Journal: Comparative Economic Studies

This paper investigates the dynamics and drivers of gender gaps in employment rates, wages, and work hours during the COVID-19 pandemic, relying on Estonian Labor Force Survey data for 2009–2020. It documents that the pandemic has, if anything, reduced gender inequality in all three domains. The evolution of inequalities revealed cyclical pattern mirroring infection rate, with upswings largely driven by parenthood and gender segregation into industries. The results suggest that labor market penalties for women with young children and women employed in affected sectors may last longer than the pandemic, threatening to widen gender inequality in a long run.

Journal article

Remote workers' free associations with working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic in Austria: the interaction between children and gender

AUTHOR(S)
Martina Hartner-Tiefenthaler; Eva Zedlacher; Tarek Josef el Sehity (et al.)

Published: August 2022 Journal: Frontiers in Psychology

Empirical evidence from the COVID-19 pandemic shows that women carried the major burden of additional housework in families. In a mixed-methods study, we investigate female and male remote workers’ experiences of working from home (WFH) during the pandemic. We used the free association technique to uncover remote workers’ representations about WFH (i.e., workers’ reflection of subjective experiences). Based on a sample of 283 Austrian remote workers cohabitating with their intimate partners our findings revealed that in line with traditional social roles, men and women in parent roles are likely to experience WFH differently. Mothers’ representations about WFH emphasize perceived incompatibility between the work and non-work sphere whereas fathers’ representations highlight work-family facilitation of WFH.

Research Report

The Covid-19 pandemic and gendered division of paid work, domestic chores and leisure: evidence from India’s first wave

AUTHOR(S)
Ashwini Deshpande

Published: July 2022 Journal: Economia Politica

Examining high frequency national-level panel data from Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE) on paid work (employment) and unpaid work (time spent on domestic work), this paper examines the effects of the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic on the gender gaps in paid and unpaid work until December 2020, using difference-in-differences (D-I-D) for estimating the before (the pandemic) and after (the pandemic set in) effects, and event study estimates around the strict national lockdown in April 2020. The DID estimates reveal a lowering of the gender gap in employment probabilities which occurs due to the lower probability of male employment, rather than an increase in female employment.

Journal article

COVID-19's silver linings: exploring the impacts of work-family enrichment for married working mothers during and after the COVID-19 partial lockdown in Ghana

AUTHOR(S)
Kwaku Abrefa Busia; Francis Arthur-Holmes; Annie Hau Nung Chan

Published: July 2022 Journal: Journal of Family Studies

Recent scholarship suggests that women have disproportionately been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic amidst lockdowns and school closures which have altogether increased women’s caregiving burden, unpaid housework and stress levels. Notwithstanding its negative impacts, this article argues that the lockdowns and school closures related to COVID-19 also had beneficial outcomes for some working mothers who had to combine work and family roles. Drawing from qualitative interviews with 39 married working mothers in both formal and informal employment, this study finds that these women during and after the partial lockdowns in urban Ghana, experienced various outcomes of work-to-family enrichment (increased time spent with family, self-rated improved sleep health, financial security), family-to-work enrichment (reduced family demands, improved work performance and output) and a mix of both (cultivation of life skills, greater personal satisfaction and happiness). Applying a role expansionist framework, the study shows the ‘positive side’ of the pandemic for married working mothers who had to juggle work and family demands.

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