Women have been more impacted by the pandemic than men, Portugal’s Minister of State and the Presidency, Mariana Vieira da Silva, said on Friday, according to local broadcaster RTP.
Vieira da Silva’s comments came ahead of an assessment of the first year of the European Strategy for Gender Equality 2020-2025.
“The study concluded that the impact of the pandemic is different on women and men,” Vieira da Silva told RTP. “It is different in employment, for example, in the hours worked, and this has an impact on wages and salaries, and later in pensions.”
Mariana Vieira da Silva recalled that there is a European strategy to discuss this issue, according to RTP.
“It is necessary to define a strategy to correct this type of inequality,” she pointed out.
“We know that a crisis does not last only as long as it lasts, the crisis remains in people’s lives.”
Vieira da Silva also recalled that the Government has been taking measures to change situations of inequality, recalling the 100% support given to families in the case of shared custody, during school closures.
Portuguese women work one more hour and 13 minutes each working day than men, between paid and unpaid work, continuing to face greater difficulty in reconciling the profession with family and personal life, RTP reported. According to a study, based on data from the National Statistics Institute (INE) and Eurostat, 78% of working women do at least one hour of domestic work per day, while only 19% of men do it.
