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Women’s Equality and the COVID-19 Caregiving Crisis
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 November 2021
Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic revealed, but did not create, the caregiving crisis in the United States: for most people, it was already a major ordeal to provide reproductive labor. The caregiving crisis was less visible before the pandemic because it was suffered unequally, in part due to the different positions of American women. Some women paid other women to do care work, women received differing sets of benefits from federal and state governments, and some women got far more support from their employers than did others. Pandemic-induced shocks, including the closure of K–12 schools and childcare centers, and reduced access to domestic workers and elder care workers, seemed to have triggered a closer alignment of perspectives and interests among diverse women. Although women’s demands for support seem to have pushed the Biden administration to propose more expansive family policies, stereotypes and norms that marginalize care work and care workers within families and across the economy also need to change to achieve equality for women.
- Type
- Reflection
- Information
- Perspectives on Politics , Volume 20 , Issue 2: Special Issue: Pandemic Politics , June 2022 , pp. 635 - 645
- Copyright
- © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Political Science Association
Footnotes
Data replication sets are available in Harvard Dataverse at: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/E7CLML
The research was conducted with support from National Science Foundation #1624871, the Andrew Carnegie Corporation, and the Norwegian Research Council #250753.
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