Caregiving is women's work: unequal distribution of unpaid housework in Chile during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Globally, the COVID-19 pandemic amplified the burden of household domestic and caregiving responsibilities unevenly for women. Confinement measures and the mandatory closure of nurseries and schools replaced in-classroom education with online education. For many households, working dynamics transitioned into remote or so-called ‘hybrid’ work, and suddenly, all household members were spending 24 hours a day at home. Using data from the first National Survey of Unpaid Home Care (ENCIC), this article offers an in-depth analysis of the gender distribution of unpaid domestic and care work within Chilean households during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our findings confirm an overload of unpaid work for women during the pandemic: they are the primary caregivers of children, teenagers and dependent people in over 70% of cases, and it is women who take over most domestic tasks at home, particularly the most time-consuming ones and those considered less pleasant by literature. Men tend to participate in shorter and simpler activities and tasks that involve leaving the house. There is no family composition where women have a higher probability than men to negotiate a lower domestic workload, not even when women are household heads. The gender disparity is even more pronounced in nuclear households, where women are 7.4 times more likely than their male partners to be responsible for household tasks and 2.9 times more likely to be in charge of caregiving.