The gendered division of paid and domestic work under lockdown

COVID-19 has uprooted many aspects of parents' daily routines, from their jobs to their childcare arrangements. In this paper, we provide a novel description of how parents in England living in two-parent opposite-gender families are spending their time under lockdown. We find that mothers' paid work has taken a larger hit than that of fathers', on both the extensive and intensive margins. We find that mothers are spending substantially longer in childcare and housework than their partners and that they are spending a larger fraction of their paid work hours having to juggle work and childcare. Gender differences in the allocation of domestic work cannot be straightforwardly explained by gender differences in employment rates or earnings. Very large gender asymmetries emerge when one partner has stopped working for pay during the crisis: mothers who have stopped working for pay do far more domestic work than fathers in the equivalent situation do

Inequalities in children’s experiences of home learning during the covid-19 lockdown in England

This paper combines novel data on the time use, home-learning practices and economic circumstances of families with children during the COVID-19 lockdown with pre-lockdown data from the UK Time Use Survey to characterise the time use of children and how it changed during lockdown, and to gauge the extent to which changes in time use and learning practices during this period are likely to reinforce the already large gaps in educational attainment between children from poorer and better-off families. We find considerable heterogeneity in children's learning experiences – amount of time spent learning, activities undertaken during this time and availability of resources to support learning. Concerningly, but perhaps unsurprisingly, this heterogeneity is strongly associated with family income and in some instances more so than before lockdown. Furthermore, our analysis suggests that any impacts of inequalities in time spent learning between poorer and richer children are likely to be compounded by inequalities not only in learning resources available at home, but also in those provided by schools

Inequality in mortality between Black and White Americans by age, place, and cause and in comparison to Europe, 1990 to 2018

Funding Information: We thank J.B., S.K., and K.G.S. for organizing the IFS working group on geographical approaches to measuring inequality in mortality, with financial support from the Economic and Social Research Council Centre for the Microeconomic Analysis of Public Policy at IFS (Grant ES/T014334/1). C.C. received support from the Science and Technology Foundation (Funda??o para a Ci?ncia e a Tecnologia [FCT]), the European Social Fund, and the Centro Operational Programme (Grant SFRH/BD/132218/2017). P.S. received support from the Centre of Studies in Geography and Spatial Planning (Grant UIDB/04084/2020), through an FCT fund. Funding Information: ACKNOWLEDGMENTS. We thank J.B., S.K., and K.G.S. for organizing the IFS working group on geographical approaches to measuring inequality in mortality, with financial support from the Economic and Social Research Council Centre for the Microeconomic Analysis of Public Policy at IFS (Grant ES/T014334/1). C.C. received support from the Science and Technology Foundation (Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia [FCT]), the European Social Fund, and the Centro Operational Programme (Grant SFRH/BD/132218/2017). P.S. received support from the Centre of Studies in Geography and Spatial Planning (Grant UIDB/04084/2020), through an FCT fund. Publisher Copyright: © 2021 National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.Although there is a large gap between Black and White American life expectancies, the gap fell 48.9% between 1990 and 2018, mainly due to mortality declines among Black Americans. We examine age-specific mortality trends and racial gaps in life expectancy in high- and low-income US areas and with reference to six European countries. Inequalities in life expectancy are starker in the United States than in Europe. In 1990, White Americans and Europeans in high-income areas had similar overall life expectancy, while life expectancy for White Americans in low-income areas was lower. However, since then, even high-income White Americans have lost ground relative to Europeans. Meanwhile, the gap in life expectancy between Black Americans and Europeans decreased by 8.3%. Black American life expectancy increased more than White American life expectancy in all US areas, but improvements in lower-income areas had the greatest impact on the racial life expectancy gap. The causes that contributed the most to Black Americans’ mortality reductions included cancer, homicide, HIV, and causes originating in the fetal or infant period. Life expectancy for both Black and White Americans plateaued or slightly declined after 2012, but this stalling was most evident among Black Americans even prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. If improvements had continued at the 1990 to 2012 rate, the racial gap in life expectancy would have closed by 2036. European life expectancy also stalled after 2014. Still, the comparison with Europe suggests that mortality rates of both Black and White Americans could fall much further across all ages and in both high-income and low-income areas.Peer reviewe