During the epidemic, the demand for child care at home increased dramatically, but men and women did not share the load evenly.

According to research released Friday by the Center for Global Development, a poverty non-profit, women took on 173 additional hours of unpaid child care last year, compared to 59 additional hours for males. In low- and middle-income nations, the gender gap worsened, with women caring for children for more than three times as long as males.

Many of the pandemic's severe economic repercussions have been felt by women, including an estimated $800 billion in lost wages, owing to increasing demands on their time at home. In the United States, the Covid-19 crisis shattered gains in pay equity, female labor force participation, and unemployment, especially among Black and Latina women. According to a McKinsey & Co. assessment, global job loss rates for women were around 1.8 times higher than for men. As Americans return to work, mothers are more likely than fathers and women without children to stay at home.

The epidemic, according to Charles Kenny, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development and one of the study's authors, just highlighted existing gender inequities.

“Every year, year in year out, there are trillions of hours of unpaid care work being done, the considerable majority by women,” he said. “We are not going to get to a world that sees gender equality until that burden is more evenly shared.”

Before the epidemic, the researchers used data from Unesco and the OECD to calculate the number of children absent from school and the average time men and women in various nations spent on unpaid childcare. The study found that in India, where school closures added 176 billion hours of child care, women took on more than ten times the burden that men did.