Egyptian women have played an unprecedented role in the Arab Spring democratic movement, possibly changing women's perception about their own rights and role. We question whether these events have translated into better outcomes within Egyptian households. We conjecture that potential changes must have been heterogeneous and depended on the local intensity of protests and women's participation over 2011-13. We exploit the geographical heterogeneity along these two margins to conduct a double difference analysis using data surrounding the period. We find a significant improvement in women's final say regarding decisions on health, socialization and household expenditure, as well as a decline in the acceptation of domestic violence and girls' circumcision, in the regions most affected by the protests. This effect is not due to particular regional patterns or preexisting trends in empowerment. It is also robust to alternative treatment definitions and confirmed by triple difference estimations. We confront our main interpretation to alternative mechanisms that could have explained this effect.

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School closures, forcibly brought about by the COVID-19 crisis in many countries, have impacted children’s lives and their learning processes. The heterogeneous implementation of distance learning solutions is likely to bring a substantial increase in education inequality, with long term consequences. The present study uses data from a survey collected during Spring 2020 lockdown in France and Italy to analyze parents’ evaluations of their children’s home schooling process and emotional well-being at time of school closure, and the role played by different distance learning methods in shaping these perceptions. While Italian parents have a generally worse judgment of the effects of the lockdown on their children, the use of interactive distance learning methods appears to significantly attenuate their negative perception. This is particularly true for older pupils. French parents rather perceive that interactive methods are effective in mitigating learning losses and psychological distress only for their secondary school children. In both countries, further heterogeneity analysis reveal that parents perceive younger children and boys to suffer more during this period.

The lockdowns imposed during the COVID-19 pandemic had an unprecedented impact on people's time use. This article analyses the changes in time spent on household tasks and parenting by men and women during the lockdowns of the spring and autumn of 2020 in France, by social category, education, working arrangements and family configurations, using data from the major longitudinal EpiCov survey. The time spent on housework was high in the spring of 2020 and caring for children was particularly time consuming. This additional domestic and parental burden affected both women and men, but women continued to perform the majority of the housework, in spite of the similar working conditions between the sexes during this period. During the first lockdown, women at the top of the social hierarchy, who generally perform fewer household chores, spent far more time than usual on these tasks, thereby temporarily reducing social differences.