Gender roles and safety of women at home in the COVID-19 era: evidence from 101 countries

ABSTRACT

This study analyzes the impact of travel restrictions due to the COVID-19 pandemic on the safety of women at home, and on home production responsibilities. We use Google’s community mobility reports to measure changes in travel patterns and Facebook’s Survey on Gender Equality at Home to measure changes in home production and safety at home during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic for 101 countries. We uncover two key findings: first, travel restrictions increase the percentage of women who felt unsafe at home, and second, travel restrictions lead to a rise in home production for both sexes, with men bearing much of the increase. We discuss the implications of these results for policies to support women and girls during pandemics.

KEYWORDS:

• Home production
• safety at home
• gender-based-violence
• gender roles
• COVID-19 pandemic

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• D13
• J16
• I18

Disclosure statement

The authors do not have any conflicts of interest to disclose. This article does not contain any studies with human participants performed by any of the authors.

Notes

1. Gender-based violence (GBV) is a form of violence targeting women and its common form includes sexual violence, domestic violence, intimate partner violence, and harmful traditional practices against women.

2. Included in the 101 are many developing countries with minimal or effectively non-existent travel restrictions. Appendix Table A3 provide a list of the countries included in our sample along with the level of travel restriction variable for each country. Interestingly, those with minimal travel restrictions are not limited to developing countries. For instance, high income countries like Sweden, Finland, and Denmark had minimal travel restrictions, and these countries are included in our analysis.

3. There is also a concern of incompatibility between Facebook and Google mobility data because these were collected at different points in time. All countries in the Google mobility data (which was collected earlier) are represented in the Facebook’s Survey on Gender Equality at Home (which was collected later). Countries that appear in both data sources are listed in Appendix Table A3.

4. Another strategy is to introduce a Box-Cox transformation to the dependent variable. We did not pursue this approach as it will unnecessarily complicate the interpretation of the estimated coefficients.

5. On 11 March 2020, the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared the outbreak of a new type of Coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, that causes COVID-19 respiratory disease, a global pandemic.

6. We also report the standardized effect of changes to travel to residential locations. For example, in column 1, we find that a one standard deviation increase in travel restrictions leads to a 0.233 standard deviation increase in the percentage of women who felt they were not safe at home, ceteris paribus.

7. The Facebook’s Survey on Gender Equality at Home reported eight home production activities: tending to animals, supporting family business, cleaning, cooking and serving meals, subsistence farming, household management, shopping for food, and collecting water or fuel.

8. The pandemic has added another layer of complexity in the already complicated relationships between the dependent variables and travel restrictions. The website https://inequality.org/facts/gender-inequality offers many interesting facts about how the Covid-19 pandemic has exacerbated long-standing gender inequalities.