Half the Sky: Women in Lockdown

WFH meant both work-from-home and work-for-home

As the nationwide lockdown began, a complete disappearance of maids plunged middle class households into an unprecedented crisis. For most working women, WFH soon came to mean both work-from-home and work-for-home. A friend told me that her husband’s main contribution (during normal times) used to be the regular grocery and veggie shopping and now he was just doing the dishes. As she was praying for an early return of her maids, she was right in thinking that a disproportionate burden of household work had fallen on her.

2001 Nobel laureate in economics, George Akerlof famously showed that when men do all the outside work, they contribute on an average 10% to the household work. But when their share of outside work falls, their share of housework never rises to more than 37%.

In fact, Indian women were not alone in their misery, it was widely reported that during the lockdown, domestic violence has shot up globally. Since long ago I read something about the condition of women during the Great Depression, I decided to check out how their successors are dealing with the worst recession since then.

In recession, generally most job losses happen in male-dominated manufacturing and construction. However, due to social distancing, this time a huge number of jobs were lost in close contact professions and women dominate such jobs. 92% of dental and medical assistants, 89% of home health aides, 89% of hair stylists, and 80% of manicurists in the US are women. This is in addition to the job losses in education, retail, hospitality etc where women have significant share too. Overall, 60% of those who lost their jobs in the first two months were women. This has been particularly hard for 15 million single mothers, many of whom worked part-time and were the first to lose their jobs. As schools and day care centres remained closed, it has put more demand on working women.

Great Depression for American women, on the other hand, was a catalyst for positive change. During the First World War, just a decade prior to the Depression, they gained entry into formal employment. Apart from teaching, they took up jobs in sales, as office secretaries, telephone operators and as clerks – soon these came to be known as ‘lace-collar’ jobs. During the Depression, at times their salaries were cut but mostly they managed to hold on to their jobs. But massive job losses in manufacturing adversely affected a very large proportion of working men. As a result, women became the primary earning member for many families.

Underpaid but employed, American working women in the 1930s

Between 1930 and 1940, the number of US women working outside their home actually increased from 10 million to 13 million. Far from looking at it as a progressive step, the contemporary American society blamed them for robbing men of much-needed employment. Today it appears impossible to believe but the US government had a formal policy of not giving women any employment under the New Deal. And the government refused to change this policy of completely banning women from public employment programmes despite protests from the first lady, Eleanor Roosevelt.

Even as they managed to improve their position outside, within the household, it created new friction. Losing their traditional status as the sole breadwinner, husbands started feeling insecure. This insecurity put a serious strain on marriages and family life became more acrimonious. Though they spent more time together but to cut cost, American families took to contraceptives in a big way. Household budgets were limited and at times, people lived in extended families. Women tried hard to save money by every possible means – sewing clothes for family, preserving fruits etc. And of course they had to do most of the cleaning and washing too.

World has moved a long way since the Great Depression but still a recession is more difficult for women than men. And this is because they continue to share higher burden of family/household work and in general, they face more difficulties outside and get paid less. And this is true across the world.

In fact Akerlof is not alone, economists and social scientists have been trying for a long time to understand why despite rising education and employment levels, women still continue to do more household work than men (when both have equal stake in efficiently running the house). A number of empirical studies show that not more than 10-30% women prefer home over career by nature (don’t go by matrimonial ads) and an equal proportion of women prefer career over home. So most women take up additional household work because either they feel more responsible for running the household or they simply want to avoid friction.

Another friend, when she moved to the States many years back, noticed that the second generation Indian girls were generally reluctant to marry boys from their own community and the reason was not difficult to find. How much house work guys share that is also a cultural trait (Indian women do more unpaid domestic and care work than women of any country, except Kazakhstan). But things do change. In the West, even in the 1970s, men did almost no housework. Today they do a lot of cleaning and cooking though child care remains almost exclusively women’s responsibility. Outside home, women’s work is far better recognized today but parity eludes them even in the USA – for every one dollar a man earns, a woman earns only 81 cents.

This lockdown has taught middle class Indians the value of household chores. Respect for maids has gone up considerably. A number of friends have promised to enhance their salaries. I do not know how many will keep that promise but definitely we are going to buy more robotic vacuum cleaners and such gadgets. A whole range of new cooks – more men but quite a few women too – made their kitchen debut recently. I guess a few are going to stick around as some men would remember their promise of helping their wives even after the lock down ends. 
We know, cataclysmic events like the two World Wars and the Great Depression have fundamentally altered the traditional gender equation in the West. Will this lockdown prove to be a similar turning point for Indian middle class women?