The lockdown exit strategy shows this government thinks Primark is more important than parenting

The value of unpaid childcare is £352bn a year – almost a fifth of our national income, and roughly the same as we spend in shops, supermarkets and department stores

Chairman Mao proclaimed that “women hold up half the sky”. But this was something else the communist dictator got wrong. For it’s much more than half – certainly in locked-down family households in England.

New survey research from the Institute for Fiscal Studies shows women have been doing the lion’s share of the childcare and housework. And this is the case even when the woman is still doing formal work from home.

It’s what economists might identify as a “path dependency” problem – women were already doing a disproportionate share of these household jobs before the lockdown and so when the overall size of the workload dramatically shot up so did women’s share.

It’s often said we don’t value things like childcare and housework, but actually we do. Or at least our statisticians have had a stab at it. The Office for National Statistics has estimated that in 2016 the value of all the unpaid childcare done over the year was £352bn.

That represents almost a fifth of our national income. It’s roughly the same as what we spend every year in shops, supermarkets and department stores.

How did the statisticians reach this number? Essentially by looking at how much it roughly costs, per hour, to buy childcare from nurseries and professional childminders and then multiplying this by the number of hours people spend doing these things in the household.

So an absence of numbers is not really the problem. The problem is that we don’t structure our home lives, our workplaces, or wider society in a way that recognises this huge social value.

It’s a rare household – in or out of lockdown – where the division of childcare and housework is equally distributed between the genders (and I hasten to add, lest my wife is reading this, that my own is no exception). Despite some progress, it’s still a relatively rare employer that is fully accommodating to the needs of the working parent.

And the government? The plan for the exit from lockdown reflects where the priorities of our political leaders lie.

Shops are set to tentatively open up from next month, Boris Johnson confirmed on Monday. Yet families will still, at this point, be unable to ask grandparents or other family members outside the household to assist with childcare. Formal childcare remains closed to everyone except keyworkers. Some children will be returning to school, but the majority won’t.

Where does that leave, say, the store manager with young kids whose employer wants him or her back in work?

There are, of course, health reasons why our national childcare infrastructure – formal and informal – is not being opened up yet. But the assumption that Primark is more economically valuable than parenting nevertheless shines through in the way our lockdown exit strategy is being presented.

The new survey on the lockdown division of labour in households is, of course, depressing from a gender equality perspective. Yet it also shows that under lockdown the number of hours in which the average father is doing some childcare is double that seen in a typical school day pre-lockdown (eight hours versus four hours). That, hypothesise the researchers, could lead to long-term change, noting that in some European countries where paternity leave has increased men tend do go on to do more childcare in general.

It’s possible that men, having experienced first-hand how physically gruelling and mentally taxing it can be (any doubters still reading should try getting a five-year-old and a seven-year-old to sit down and do their electronic homework simultaneously), will emerge from this experience with a new outlook. “If this shock has reshaped attitudes towards gender and work, and if these changed attitudes in turn prompt lasting change in families and workplaces, that could be one silver lining to what has so far been a very dark cloud,” the researchers say.

Let’s flesh out that new world. The state provides universal free-at-the-point-of-use childcare, recognising that the usual cost objections make no sense given the overall social value it creates. We pay childcare workers more and give them better training, recognising that, ultimately, we get what we pay for. Employers offer more flexible hours for parents, recognising that an employee’s true workload is not encompassed by office hours.

And in the household? Men like me start holding up our share of the sky.