Flicking through our slowly emptying family calendar, a relic of a more innocent age jumps out. “Back to school”, it says in thick black pen, across the beginning of next week. Well, dream on. Across Europe schools are now tentatively beginning to reopen, at least in countries such as Denmark which locked down earlier than we did; German schools too are likely to start returning from early May. But in Britain, it might be half term before that can be considered. Nobody wants schools and nurseries to reopen until everyone is sure it’s safe, obviously. Children seem for the most part only mildly affected by the virus but not immune, and teachers continue to be vulnerable; parental physical distancing amidst the general muddle of drop-off and pickup would be a struggle, and once the kids are mingling freely some adults will want to do the same. Yet knowing that there’s no alternative doesn’t make it any easier to earn a living while you’re trying to teach the bus stop method for long division. For not everyone is charmed by small persons barging gleefully into video calls, and the prejudices some employers have always harboured against working parents haven’t magically disappeared overnight. The charity Working Families reports a spike in demand for its free legal services; it’s hearing from women told that if they can’t manage working around their children they should just take unpaid leave, and from pregnant women sacked if they won’t work in risky public-facing roles. The tragic death of a heavily pregnant nurse, Mary Agyeiwaa Agyapong, is a chilling reminder of the anxieties facing many expectant key workers, although we still cannot know whether she was infected at work or not. Parents can now ask to be furloughed on 80% of salary if they can’t work due to caring responsibilities, an enormous relief to some. But if the recession deepens and companies start shedding staff to survive, could that become a trap? Asking to be furloughed is one thing if you assume that once this is over, everyone will simply get their jobs back, but another if it turns out to be a much bumpier recovery. What if asking now is held against you later on when redundancies have to be considered? Should you just stagger on, hiding the fact that you’re having to get half your work done in the middle of the night, for fear of being judged the weak link? Parents worry at the best of times about competing with childfree colleagues who can put in as many hours as it takes, but strip away our childcare and we feel more exposed than ever. This epidemic has been a giant leap back to the dark days before organised childcare; families can muddle through for a bit, but in the longer term home-working with kids underfoot is the 21st-century equivalent of Victorian urchins playing under their mothers’ looms in textile mills. Single parents, the vast majority of them women, are as ever at the sharp end of this, and lone parent charity Gingerbread warns that many feel increasingly “alone and overwhelmed”. But dual career couples have their challenges too. There’s no hard data, obviously, on which gender is doing the lion’s share of home-schooling, toddler-entertaining, and fielding heated demands for retribution against whichever sibling started it. It’s too early for research to confirm which parent the kids consider fair game for interrupting at all times, and which is most likely to be enjoying long stretches of concentration while everyone tiptoes silently around their Very Important Phone Call. But, jobs permitting, many families will probably fall into much the same groove inside lockdown as they do outside of it. Couples who usually split childcare and chores scrupulously fairly will still try and do so, but elsewhere, the gender that previously did 60% more of the unpaid work is probably picking up a fair bit more of the slack now. Whichever partner chose a job in normal times that seemed flexible around the family is more likely to be slumped over a laptop at 2am now, the classic price paid for stealing time with the kids in the afternoon. And if one of you has to crack and request a furlough, it makes more sense for that to be the lower earner. It’s men who are the most obvious victims of this epidemic, being twice as likely as women to die of coronavirus. Seven in 10 of those ending up in intensive care with Covid-19 are also male, something only partly explained by risk factors like more men smoking. On the economic side, the Institute for Fiscal Studies finds job losses so far have disproportionately hit women, as well as young and low-paid people. That’s no surprise given who tends to work in the pubs, restaurants and shops most directly hit by lockdown, and things may change as other industries start being affected by slumping consumer demand. But the lesson from the aftermath of the banking crash is that ministers were too slow to realise austerity was affecting women differently from men; there’s no excuse for making the same mistake this time. Now that four in 10 companies still trading are seeking to reduce staffing levels and over a quarter are cutting hours, ministers should be auditing what’s happening on the ground and using the pulpit of those daily press conferences to warn employers that discrimination law still applies in a crisis. There’s a reason it’s illegal to target women on maternity leave when making redundancies, and it’s that too many bosses try it on at the best of times. Don’t let the worst of times become an excuse for turning back the clock.