Alison O'Connor: Covid has reduced women to a 1950s gender stereotype

Alison O'Connor asks why women have been the ones to pick up most, if not all, of the slack when it comes to childcare, home schooling and keeping the household running during Covid

Even mothers who have not been economically affected by the pandemic will say the pressure has been huge trying to keep on top of working, schooling, the laundry, cooking and keeping the kids on an even keel, while mostly failing to find any spare personal moments at all. 

It’s been described as the shadow pandemic — the way in which the lives of women have been so disproportionately affected by Covid, all the way from the boardroom to the kitchen table. Those effects stretch from the near-impossible juggling of work and home schooling, to worldwide increases in domestic abuse and child marriages.

At its most basic level, it is that women will tell you anecdotally that a conversation about Seesaw would have many fathers assume the subject under discussion is a piece of playground equipment, rather than the remote learning technology favoured by Irish primary schools.