Credit: CC0 Public Domain

The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated and brought into focus the ongoing disproportionate burden on mothers when it comes to household logistics, child care and financial inequity. It also revealed just how deeply embedded and structurally reinforced that burden is.

When labor that had previously been a shared social responsibility shifted into individual households, the load fell mainly to women. But perhaps even more important is that the true impact of this burden was invisible— even to women themselves .

Data over three years, from 2020 to 2023 —the height of the pandemic—laid bare the reality of a poorly scaffolded social structure. What had been seen as informal or "natural" for women to take on was, in fact, an uneven distribution of labor and responsibility.

That reality has clear economic effects. Canadian women earn approximately 69% of the average salary of men .…