Since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, women have been bearing the brunt of extra childcare duties and unpaid domestic work, a study by the United Nations (UN) has found.

Women in a number of countries around the world have been spending around 31 hours on average a week on childcare, the study by the UN’s gender equality body, UN Women, found.

This was an average 5.2 hours a week more than pre-pandemic time spent on childcare, and compared to 3.5 more hours men said they were now spending on childcare.

The statistic came from research conducted by market research firm Ipsos for UN Women, polling 14,509 people aged 16-74 across 16 countries in October, as part of its brief “Whose time to care? Unpaid care and domestic work during Covid-19,” published Wednesday.

UN Women warned that there was a “real danger that the pandemic will erase the important but fragile progress that women have made over the past decades.”

The report highlighted that that while both men and women had seen their unpaid workload increase since the start of the pandemic, women were still doing the lion’s share of such work.

The wider brief consisted of data from 38 countries. It showed that two-fifths of women said they had been spending more time on unpaid domestic work, versus 54% of men and 28% of women said the intensity of that work had increased, compared to 16% of men.

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