A curious article from the Wall Street Journal about effects of the pandemic on working parents. Some numbers have been crunched and conclusions made about a correlation which is not mutually exclusive. In a Franklin Templeton-Gallup Economics of Recovery Study around 47% of parents who had children learning entirely remotely or in a hybrid format due to the coronavirus pandemic are working full-time. This compares with some 71% of parents whose children are back in the school itself. However, what this does point to is that many adults (7 million in the US) were not “working because they were home caring for children who weren’t attending day care or school in-person” as reported in a census in October: compared to 6 million in May 2020. This illustrates the direct effect that school closures are having on working parents and the pressure that they are put under forcing them to dedicate more time to their children, at the expense of their career, family income etc. It also appears that women have been worse affected than men, with only 41% of women with school-age children working full-time, versus 69% of men.
