Volume 51 - Article 15 | Pages 501–552
The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on women’s care work and employment in the Middle East and North Africa
By Caroline Krafft, Irene Selwaness, Maia Sieverding
Abstract
Background: The COVID-19 pandemic was accompanied by widespread childcare and school closures. Emerging evidence – primarily from high-income countries – suggests that these changes increased women’s time in unpaid care, which may be a particular challenge for women with paid employment.
Objective: The paper examines how women’s unpaid care responsibilities and employment changed during the pandemic in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), specifically: (1) How did the closure of schools and nurseries impact married women’s time spent in care work? (2) How were exits from employment related to care responsibilities? and (3) How did changes in employment vary by pre-pandemic type of employment?
Methods: This paper uses multiple waves of phone surveys from five MENA countries. Country-specific information on school modalities is a key covariate. The analyses present both descriptive statistics and multivariate models for outcomes of care work and employment. Analyses also include fixed-effect logit models, with woman fixed effects, leveraging the multiple observations per woman in the panel.
Results: When schools were totally closed during the pandemic, married women with children under age 18 reported performing more care work. However, exits from employment during the pandemic were not increased by women’s care responsibilities.
Contribution: Even before the pandemic, structural inequalities pushed women in MENA – particularly married women with young children – out of the types of employment that were difficult to reconcile with care responsibilities. These findings underscore the importance of local employment conditions in mediating the impact of the pandemic on gender inequality.
Author's Affiliation
- Caroline Krafft - St. Catherine University, United States of America EMAIL
- Irene Selwaness - Cairo University, Egypt EMAIL
- Maia Sieverding - American University of Beirut, Lebanon EMAIL
Other articles by the same author/authors in Demographic Research
An investigation of Jordan’s fertility stall and resumed decline: The role of proximate determinants
Volume 45 - Article 19
Introducing the Sudan Labor Market Panel Survey 2022
Volume 51 - Article 4
The mental health of youth and young adults during the transition to adulthood in Egypt
Volume 36 - Article 56
Most recent similar articles in Demographic Research
The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on mortality in Uruguay from 2020 to 2022
Volume 51 - Article 29
| Keywords:
COVID-19,
excess mortality,
life expectancy,
Uruguay
Trajectories of US parents’ divisions of domestic labor throughout the COVID-19 pandemic
Volume 51 - Article 12
| Keywords:
childcare,
COVID-19,
division of labor,
fathers,
gender,
housework,
mothers
Lessons from the pandemic: Gender inequality in childcare and the emergence of a gender mental health gap among parents in Germany
Volume 51 - Article 3
| Keywords:
COVID-19,
division of childcare,
exhaustion,
gender role attitudes,
loneliness,
mental health,
pandemic,
stress
Measuring short-term mobility patterns in North America using Facebook advertising data, with an application to adjusting COVID-19 mortality rates
Volume 50 - Article 10
| Keywords:
COVID-19,
data collection,
Facebook,
mortality,
North America,
short-term mobility
Immigrant mortality advantage in the United States during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic
Volume 50 - Article 7
| Keywords:
COVID-19,
immigrants,
mortality
Cited References: 114
Download to Citation Manager
PubMed
Google Scholar