When schools and day cares closed during the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, women were more likely than men to scale back or terminate their employment in order to attend to their children. “Women do an average of 75% of the world’s total unpaid-care work, including child care, caring for the elderly, cooking, and cleaning,” one analysis by the Harvard Business Review found in September 2020. “As Covid-19 has disproportionately increased the time women spend on family responsibilities, women have dropped out of the workforce at a higher rate than explained by labor-market dynamics alone.
