Brendan
Churchill

Young people have been regarded as “not at risk” of coronavirus, but what about the economic impact of social distancing and “lockdowns” arising from the pandemic? How have young women fared in comparison to young men? To address these questions, this study draws upon data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, comparing young men and women and their older counterparts.

This paper draws on data from Work and Care During COVID-19, an online survey of Australians during pandemic lockdown in May 2020 (n = 2,722). It focuses on how subsamples of lesbian, gay, and bisexual mothers and fathers in couples (n = 280) and single mothers (n = 480) subjectively experienced unpaid work and care during lockdown compared with heterosexual mothers and fathers in couples, and with partnered mothers, respectively.

Society is about to undergo another significant and transformative change–a Fourth Industrial Revolution, according to Klaus Schwab (2016), founding director of the World Economic Forum and Professor of Economics: “we stand on the brink of a technological revolution that will fundamentally alter the way we live, work and relate to one another”.

COVID-19 and the associated lockdowns meant many working parents were faced with doing paid work and family care at home simultaneously. To investigate how they managed, this article draws a subsample of parents in dual-earner couples (n = 1536) from a national survey of 2722 Australian men and women conducted during lockdown in May 2020. It asked how much time respondents spent in paid and unpaid labour, including both active and supervisory care, and about their satisfaction with work–family balance and how their partner shared the load.

This five-volume publication features contributions by over eighty authors from around the globe and casts a wide gaze across themes that are drawn from the works in the exhibition. Intended to operate in a broader setting than a traditional exhibition catalogue, the volume presents discourses from a variety of perspectives, including those of academics, journalists, literary figures, social commentators, artists and curators.