hat about the sexist impact of this pandemic? When are you going to talk about the fact it kills more men?” I admit my first instinct on encountering these questions when I’ve raised the unequal impact of coronavirus on black and Asian people has been to dismiss those posing them as bad-faith men’s rights activists. But if I stop and pause, I can try to understand where they are coming from: white men who have never been educated about structural sexism or racism, who have never fallen on the wrong side of the patriarchal power dynamic, and who have no understanding of what discrimination feels like, see that men appear twice as likely to die of Covid-19 as women and they feel scared. So do women; after all, these are our fathers and partners, our brothers and sons. But these awful male death rates must not obscure the fact that while viral biology does not respect the patriarchy, it has still shaped all aspects of the response to the pandemic, which is taking a greater economic and relational toll on women. Recessions typically affect men more than women, because male employment is more heavily concentrated in cyclical sectors such as manufacturing and construction, whereas women are more likely to work in the public sector. But this is not a typical recession: two of the hardest-hit sectors have been hospitality and retail, both of which are disproportionately female. Moreover, the lockdown has put the vicious cycle that is the gender pay gap on steroids. The gap exists from the moment men and women start work but it gets progressively wider once people become parents: women are more comprehensively compensated to take time off work and, because they already earn less than men, it makes more financial sense for mothers to work part-time after having children, stymying their career progression. This effect is being replicated in the lockdown: it is mothers who are cutting back their hours to pick up the slack at home. The result is that women are doing less paid work and more domestic labour. Mothers are 47% more likely to have lost their job, quit or been furloughed than fathers. What’s more, the proportion of mothers who report being responsible for 90-100% of childcare has risen from 27% to 45% during the lockdown, with seven in 10 mothers saying they are completely or mostly responsible for home schooling. All that home schooling, cleaning, childcare and household management, all while being cooped up with your partner and children for 24/7, and trying to work from home, takes its toll. At the worst end, the lockdown will have produced more domestic abusers. But there will also be lots more homes where family relationships have come under great strain and it is often women who bear the burden of managing everyone’s emotions and trying to make it all OK. But the lockdown could also offer a sliver of opportunity. Many men who have been furloughed will be spending more time with their children; though men still do less childcare, it has significantly increased during lockdown. It’s obvious from talking to male friends who are off work that it has transformed some of their relationships with their kids. That’s the thing about this pandemic: it has revealed deep structural inequalities in class, race and gender that we have long swept under the carpet and without concerted and radical action it will undoubtedly make them worse. But the very act of exposure provides an opportunity for change if only we had the imagination. It is hardly surprising that imagination has not been forthcoming from the government, given the lack of diversity among the architects of its pandemic response. The men who boast of working round the clock, even when they are ill with suspected Covid-19, don’t seem to have much sense of the strains it will be imposing on women. The basics need to be in place: free universal childcare and re-upping the ante on gender pay-gap reporting, which has fallen by the wayside during the lockdown. But beyond this, it is helpful to walk in the shoes of men who want to do the right thing. Men get a fatherhood pay bonus when they become dads because their employers expect them to conform to the male breadwinner model, pulling in longer hours while their partner looks after the kids. Yet dads who ask for parental leave or for flexible working often face discrimination themselves. Two measures would help. First, we should allocate at least three months of use-it-or-lose-it parental leave to each parent in their baby’s first year and it should be paid on the same basis as statutory maternity pay. This would cost much less than the government’s marriage tax break and its use-it-or-lose-it status would remove the stigma around fathers requesting parental leave. In Iceland, each parent gets three months, with a further three months allocated between them, and the vast majority of dads take their leave. This has long-term benefits: better developmental outcomes for children and a fairer gender split in domestic labour. Second, we should financially encourage fathers and mothers to more evenly split the paid work. Advocates of a four-day working week often fail to acknowledge that we are almost there – the average working week is 32 hours – it’s just that four in 10 female workers work part-time, compared with one in eight men. We should consider changes to the tax system to incentivise men to work less and women to work more, for example, taxing someone’s last 20% of income at a higher rate, in recognition that it is not optimal from either a child development or a gender equality perspective for any parent to be working five days a week while the other works three or fewer. The gender equality debate is understandably often framed purely in terms of women’s equal workplace rights. But arguments about men’s equal rights to be great parents are not just complementary but fundamental to women achieving parity in both the workplace and the home.