As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, many people have found themselves unemployed or with drastically reduced hours, while others have shifted to working from home. And the closing of schools and other childcare services has meanwhile dramatically increased the burden of unpaid care work on families – especially women.
"Look Beyond" is a new campaign that seeks to ensure that this burden is equally shared by both men and women, and encourages society to look beyond traditional masculine and feminine roles to a world where household chores and childcare have no gender.
Implemented jointly by UN Women and UNFPA, the campaign is taking place in the Eastern Partnership[i], within the framework of a European Union-funded regional programme. It was designed around the belief that the unprecedented situation of a world-altering pandemic can also provide us with a unique opportunity: to address imbalanced power dynamics and preconceptions about what women and men can and should do, that are at the root of the unequal distribution of unpaid care work.
Men doing more unpaid care work means that women will be under much less stress, will have more time to dedicate to their professional development and will be empowered to transcend outdated gender roles in other ways. Challenging gender stereotypes within the family and encouraging men to understand and define their masculinity in different ways has also been shown to decrease the number of incidents of domestic violence, allowing women to feel safer in their own homes.