This research, conducted by Dr. Charlotte Bendall (University of Birmingham) and Dr. Gemma Mitchell (UEA), aims to explore the ongoing implications of the COVID-19 pandemic for future legislative reforms encouraging fathers to conduct caring work. This is with a broader aim of achieving gender equality.
The research seeks to ask the following questions:
- How have childcare responsibilities been divided between parents during the pandemic?
- Are men getting more involved in this sort of caring labour than they were before the initial ‘lockdown’? If, as has been suggested by recent quantitative research, they are not conducting as great a share of this work as women, what is holding them back?
- As legal limits on social contact are removed, have parents fallen back into previous routines? Alternatively, have the ‘lockdowns’ led to a long-standing change in parenting?
- How has COVID-19 changed what it means to be a ‘father’, or a ‘mother’, if at all?