COVID-19...Who Will Wash the Dishes and Change the Diapers? Evidence from A Post COVID-19 Time Use Survey on Egypt

This paper contributes to the discussion on the restructure of workers’ time use -female workers in particular- as a result of COVID-19 and the subsequent impact this restructure might have on labor supplies. The subject matter of the study is hence to study the effect of COVID-19 on market and within-household labor supplies- namely for women who used to work before the outbreak of COVID-19 in Egypt which took place mid-March of the year 2020. To document and discuss the shifts in time use towards more home-based activities and implications such shifts might have on women’s market employment-related decisions, we construct time-use profiles using the newly collected time-use survey from CETUS20. The main findings of the paper show that workers in general – females with children in particular- have restructured their time use as a response to the COVID-19 health crisis. Longer hours on domestic work (housework and child-care), particularly with the closure of daycare services and educational institutions, have been the highlight for the surveyed females with children. The never-married working population allocated more time for paid work (both remote and on-site) compared to their ever-married peers. Regardless the marital status, women generally work less hours in the labor market than men; this gender gap in time spent on paid work is larger within the ever-married population, of around 100 and 70 minutes for the ever-married and never-married groups respectively. The paper’s analyses show as well that both the presence and the age of children significantly increases the women’s time allocated to child-care.