In times of crisis, the women’s movement and women’s politics often complain about a “backlash”, an increased discrimination against women. It is not uncommon for the protagonists to be right with this diagnosis, but sometimes they overshoot the mark. This phenomenon was also observed during the pandemic: Although men died significantly more often from Covid-19, feminist researchers soon declared women to be the losers of the virus crisis. The empirical basis for such clichéd claims is thin.
Jutta Allmendinger, President of the Social Research Center Berlin (WZB), found drastic words in the first lockdown: Women and especially mothers experienced a “terrible retraditionalization” as a result of the Corona measures, she said in May 2020 on Anne Will’s talk show . The sociologist’s statement at this point was based more on speculation than on reliable data. A non-representative WZB survey had shown that mothers continued to work less hours than fathers after the school and daycare center closings, and some even gave up their professional activity completely. Indeed, in many families it was mostly female substitute teachers who took over the improvised home tuition. When the public educational institutions closed and children and young people were largely left to their own devices, the good old nuclear family, and above all the housewife, should take care of it.
Unfamiliar experiences
One roll backwards? Was emancipation really “turned back by 30 years”, as Allmendinger had asserted a little too quickly? Men also had unusual experiences in the pandemic, mainly because of the increasing use of the home office as a form of work. A project by Bielefeld University and the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW) presented more precise facts for the first time in June 2020 on the basis of the “Socio-Economic Panel”. The team of scientists asked how much time parents with underage children had spent on care and housework in April 2020. According to these data, mothers achieved 7.6 hours per day and fathers 4.2 hours per day. Compared to the pre-Corona era, an additional load of around two hours was calculated for both genders. The study does not support the thesis of a relapse into old behavior patterns: women still do significantly more unpaid care work, but most of the couples shared the extra work that resulted from home schooling on a relatively equal basis.
As early as 2019, the Institute for Economic and Social Sciences of the trade union Hans Böckler Foundation examined the time spent by men and women in the home office. The study carried out by the gender researcher Yvonne Lott came to results that were not very encouraging in terms of gender politics: According to this, fathers used the opportunity to work from home more for overtime at work than for family care activities. But can this result simply be transferred to the special situation of the past year and a half?
A survey by the Wiesbaden Federal Institute for Population Research (BiB) on “Parents during the Corona crisis” rejects the backlash thesis even more explicitly than the DIW study. The participation of men in care activities even increased during the pandemic. Previously, the share was 33.3 percent, but then increased to 41.5 percent: “The division of tasks is more egalitarian than before Corona,” said family researcher and BiB director Norbert Schneider. The scientist assumes, however, that the male willingness to do housework and parenting will decline again when schools and daycare centers are open permanently and reliably. However, there is still a lack of well-founded material on the shifts in the gender ratio during the second, considerably longer lockdown last winter. It is quite possible that in this later phase a gender gap has actually opened up to the detriment of women and mothers, which means that research results from 2020, which are more flattering for fathers, are no longer tenable. This indicates that the male work in the home office has decreased significantly compared to the first months of the Corona crisis. The social importance of professional home work is overestimated anyway: Even at the beginning of the pandemic, a maximum of 40 percent of the workforce was working from home. Shop assistants, bus drivers or nurses never had this option.
Women, the “silent reserve”
The controversial term “retraditionalization” applies under another aspect: contact restrictions and visiting bans led to a withdrawal into one’s own four walls and to a mental fixation on core groups defined by kinship. The social scientist Gisela Notz calls this “familism”. Other networks on the fringes of the circle of friends and acquaintances, on the other hand, did not work for a long time in Corona times, or at best only very regulated. Private appointments, choir rehearsals, rounds of card games or soccer training were canceled for months. Not only was professional access to the workplace blocked, public, horizons-broadening educational spaces such as adult education centers, concert halls, museums and libraries were also closed and temporarily lost their importance.
The now absurd quip of the late sociologist Ulrich Beck of “verbal open-mindedness with extensive behavioral rigidity” applies to state crisis policy under gender aspects. After the initial applause on balconies for the predominantly female health workers, little concrete support followed. Some (but by no means all) “systemically relevant” nursing staff received special bonuses, but there were no serious collective bargaining increases and thus salary increases. The “rescue packages” of politics, especially the increased short-time working allowance, primarily served to reassure a male working class. In the cultural professions, on the other hand, where the proportion of women is considerably higher than in the auto industry or in mechanical engineering, the state has only misdirected and accompanied by threats of examinations. A study by the DIW on the consequences of the pandemic for small self-employed found that women in particular have given up their freelance work. As in the past, they have withdrawn into the “silent reserve”, as labor market research calls it: They are content with their role as mothers, only work as precarious mini-jobbers or live on Hartz IV.
In this respect, Allmendiger was not completely wrong when she painted regressions in the gender ratio on Anne Will’s wall in May 2020. The sociologist’s warning was justified that women have to accept professional disadvantages when they take on care activities – and so the risk of “feminized poverty” increases, especially for single mothers. But Corona has not “set back by decades” equality between men and women.
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