Cause for concerns: gender inequality in experiencing the COVID-19 lockdown in Germany

ABSTRACT

COVID-19 is having a tremendous impact on gender relations, as care needs have been magnified due to schools and day-care closures. Using topic modeling on over 1,100 open reports from a survey fielded during the first four weeks of the lockdown in Germany, we shed light on how personal experiences of the lockdown differ between women and men. Our results show that, in general, people were most concerned about social contacts and childcare. However, we find clear differences among genders: women worried more about childcare while men were more concerned about paid work and the economy. We argue that the COVID-19 pandemic is affecting women more heavily than men not only at the physical level of work (e.g. women are reducing more paid work hours than men), but also through increasing the division regarding the cognitive level of work (e.g. women are more worried about childcare work while men are about paid work). These developments can potentially contribute to a future widening of the gender wage gap during the recovery process.

KEYWORDS:

• Corona
• cognitive labor
• pandemic
• gender
• Germany
• topic models

Acknowledgements

We thank Theodora Benesch for proofreading.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We focus on differences between respondents who are male and female. 15 respondents in the overall data reported a diverse gender identity, but none of them answered the open question.

2 We follow the ‘structural sampling model’ (Ibáñez 1979). Therefore, the sampling was done ad hoc and intended to collect information on the experiences and meanings given to the COVID-19 lockdown by women and men. Our intention, as in Barbeta and Cano (2017: 16), ‘was not to investigate any aggregate of individual discourses, nor a population universe. The sample developed was structural in nature and aimed to represent a discursive universe linked to macro social groups.’ In our case, the social groups were women and men living in Germany during the lockdown to study gender variations in perceptions of the Corona crisis.

3 All translations by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Christian S. Czymara

Christian S. Czymara is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Social Sciences, Goethe University Frankfurt. His research interests include immigration, social conflict, political communication, and political attitudes. He recently published in Social Forces, International Migration Review, and European Sociological Review. More info: www.czymara.com.

Alexander Langenkamp

Alexander Langenkamp is a PhD candidate at the Goethe University Frankfurt. His research is concerned with the consequences of perceived loneliness and social isolation on social participation and political attitudes and behavior.

Tomás Cano

Tomás Cano is currently postdoctoral researcher at the University of Frankfurt (Germany), affiliated to the Life Course Centre (The University of Queensland, Australia) and did his PhD at Pompeu Fabra University (Barcelona, Spain). His research focuses on the study of social stratification, gender inequality, and child development. His work has appeared in journals like Journal of Marriage and Family or European Sociological Review. More info: www.tomascano.eu.