Report on Covid and Gender: Case of Lithuania

This report shed the light on negative consequences of COVID-19 pandemic more often experienced by women in Lithuanian society due to structural gender inequalities such as pay gap, care gap, pension gap, life expectancy gap and other structural reasons. On the one hand, women’s unemployment grew significantly faster than men’s, because they mostly work in the sectors, which were partially or completely closed during the quarantine period. On the other hand the risk to be infected by COVID-19 was higher to women because they mostly occupy the professions in health care and social work. Additionally, women mainly work in the grocery shops, drug stores and other places where work at home is not an option. Working mothers twice often than men experienced difficulties to balance work and caring duties while working at home when their children also stayed at home due to closed schools, kindergartens and informal education activities. Most often women are single parents and experienced more difficulties in labour market and taking care of their children. During pandemic their risk to poverty increased. COVID-19 pandemic had its negative effect on dynamics of domestic violence in Lithuania. Though in 2020 there were less registered crimes of domestic violence than in 2019, but number of murders at home increase from 21 cases in 2019 to 28 cases in 2020 as well as numbers on severe health impairment. Some experts noted that due to quarantine people were forced to isolation and this made an impact on increase of domestic violence but decrease in reporting about it.