Home in the pandemic: Inequality in household and care tasks in Paraguay

Abstract

Inequality is the core of invisible discrimination that limits women’s rights and freedoms, preventing their autonomy. This work explores and analyzes the scope of the inequality in domestic tasks during the COVID-19 quarantine in Paraguay. A mixed, nested concurrent design was used, with a dominant descriptive-comparative quantitative model and a phenomenological qualitative section. An online survey was designed and applied to 1030 adult participants. The results show that women perform the most housework and care for person/s. Home responsibilities are a topic of argument in the couple. However, women perceive their partners “help” them while men perceive themselves as more participatory despite not being so. Likewise, LGBT couples report greater equality.