Labour Market and Unpaid Childcare Trajectories by Gender During the COVID-19 Pandemic in South Africa: Lessons for Policy
Date
2022-09
Authors
Mosomi, Jacqueline
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Abstract
Measures taken to mitigate the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, such as the closure of
Early Childhood Development (ECD) centres and Schools, presented working parents
with a time allocation challenge. This is because individuals have had to balance office
work, childcare, and housework. Results from the QLFS show that, although both men
and women lost about the same number of jobs, more women have dropped out of
the labour force leading to a slight increase in the gender labour force participation
gap. This aggregate result, however, masks differences between different groups of
women, for example, the labour force participation (LFP) gap among black Africans
widened more than the LFP gap in the white sub-group. Investigation of labour
market hours showed a widening of the hours gap between men and women by
the first quarter of 2021. A further investigation of both hours worked and childcare
hours using NIDS-CRAM reveals that, when labour market production and childcare
are considered together, women work more hours than men. Women work about an
hour less than men on average in the labour market, but more than make up for this
by working between 1.5-2 hours more than men doing childcare. During the strictest
part of the COVID-19 lockdown, this stretched to 3.5-4 hours more for childcare than
men. An investigation of trajectories using sequence analysis shows that, over the
course of the year between February 2020 and March 2021, women who had been
working before the first lockdown were more likely than men to spend spells not
working. Additionally, spells outside of the labour market more often coincided with
long hours of childcare for women than for men. Of the sample of men and women
who were employed in February 2020, only 62% of men and 51% of women were still
employed a year later, while about 5% of women, and only 2.5% of men, became
permanently not employed after February 2020. The policy implication here is that,
there is need for the state to allow for the expansion of ECD centres by reducing
registration bottlenecks and making these centres affordable to all by increasing
funding. This will lift the burden for families, and especially women, and enable those
who have dropped out of the labour market to return and increase employment as
the ECD sector is one of the female dominated sectors.
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Keywords
COVID-19; Gender inequality; Labour force participation; Time allocation; Care burden