Professor Sophie Harman from Queen Mary University of London has written an opinion piece for the Independent on how the UK lockdown this year has seen a rise in domestic violence and increased childcare and domestic burdens on women. She states that the government putting the UK back on lockdown is missing a key issue here of ‘the gendered consequences of lockdown.’ Harman writes: “Domestic violence has gone up. In heterosexual couples women increased their time spent on domestic labour and decreased their time spent on paid work. And women did the majority of childcare and homeschooling when the schools shut. They took an economic hit in a myriad of ways from being more likely than men to lose their job to working in sectors worst affected by lockdown.”
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