Editor's Note: (David M. Perry is a journalist and historian. He is senior academic adviser in the history department of the University of Minnesota. Follow him on Twitter. The views expressed here are those of the author. View more opinion articles on CNN.)
(CNN) I was doing OK with this lockdown until schools officially closed for the academic year. My wife and I were managing to take it one day at a time at home, while still wrestling with the challenges of two full-time jobs and two full-time kids. But when Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz announced in late April that schools were closed for the year, I was wrecked.
Intellectually, I had known it was coming. I had known there was no realistic way to restart school this spring. But still I felt the panic rising and had to sit quietly for a while in our shared office, as the dread forced me to contemplate the realities of the coming weeks. And what about a summer without camp? And what if they can't go back in the fall? In his bedroom above the office, my son watched a Spider-Man video and played loudly with a collection of toys, adding little percussive thumps to my ruminations. My daughter in her room, likely lost in YouTube videos, was surely not doing her math homework.
I focused on my breathing, trying to get my head around the future. That's the moment I decided that something had to give, and what's more, that "something" would be my time and my work.
As the pandemic intensifies, it's increasingly clear that the economic consequences of the pandemic are already being visited more heavily on women across all sectors of the economy. Everyone's reality during a crisis is their own, and some have many more resources than others. But for those lucky enough to have the resources, especially, as we head towards Mother's Day, this is a critical moment to be aware of the big picture. It's a time for men like me to really look at who is shouldering what work in the household and ask whether we might be able to do just a little bit more.
I'm in the enviable position of having a job at all, let alone one in which my supervisor has made it clear that care-giving is an appropriate use of an additional 80 hours of paid leave made available to us by the university where I work. Still, despite the impossibility of trying to work full time and take care of the kids -- let alone educate them -- I had been resisting even contemplating taking the time off. I felt I could somehow manage to do everything.
I was wrong. Now I'm using 16 hours a week to have four afternoons where I can focus on the children and the household until the end of the school year. What comes after that is anyone's guess.
My wife and I have always resisted prescribed gender roles in our marriage, preferring instead to try to be intentional about divisions of household labor and caregiving. At our best, we communicate well about who is doing what and try to be flexible as our needs and circumstances change, always aiming for equality rather than sameness. I like to fold laundry. My wife likes to dust the mantle. The cat box makes her sneeze. Cat vomit makes me gag.
Raising kids and keeping the house in order isn't glamorous, but it's satisfying when it works and we try to keep an even keel when things get difficult. Still, over a decade ago in Chicago I launched my academic career and my wife delayed her education (and thus her career) to have kids and provide the bulk of the early caregiving. Now she's a food scientist, was recently promoted and her work just never seems to quit, even though she can't get back into her lab yet. It's my turn to step up.
It's too soon to tell how the repercussions of this pandemic and economic crisis will play out across America, but we know that the hazards will not be felt equally. The threats to the economic status of women in the wake of Covid-19 are many and varied. The Economic Policy Institute, for example, has released preliminary analysis of unemployment data that shows disproportionate numbers of women are losing their jobs. A number of the threats relate not to macroeconomic forces and structural bias in the workforce, but rather to the microeconomies and relationships within a single family. There's reason to be concerned about a potential rise in domestic violence, but even the happiest of partnerships may result in unequal sharing of the psychological and career-related risks of this shutdown.
Women continue to do most caregiving in the home, from tending to children, to organizing education (now a full-time home-based job), to shopping, to managing the emotional needs of the family. Surveys indicate that men frequently claim to do at least 50% of the homeschooling but only 3% of women agree that their spouse is doing more. This isn't new; fathers like me often think we're doing more than we are, according to studies of time diaries.
This discrepancy in perception is one of the significant reasons women are being stripped of the time they need to manage their careers as well as their families. In higher education, editors of academic journals say that submissions by female scholars have already dropped more than 50% in some fields, whereas male scholars are submitting more work.
None of this is surprising. For years, I've been writing about the "daddy bonus" and "mommy penalty" that working parents experience. Particularly among white college-educated heterosexual cisgender couples (a lot of qualifiers, but economic analysis often requires narrowing one's field), becoming a dad connotes trustworthiness and responsibility and comes with as much as an 8% bump in earnings. Mothers, with the slight exception at the very top of the economic ladder, lose as much as 4% per child. Most of us don't even worry about dads and work. An anonymized internet search for "working dad" returns about 400,000 hits, whereas "working mom" returns over 6 million, indicating a huge gap in our conversations around parenting and work that has only gotten worse in the past five years since I've been tracking these numbers.
I can't solve these big problems, but I do think that talking about them helps make intangible forces that promote inequality more visible. So does taking concrete, measurable steps, like taking time off work. I'm letting my wife know that after helping my daughter finish her math and my son finish his science, I'm taking them to the park. I know she'll get more work done in a quiet house. Then I'll come back and start making dinner.