March 25 is Equal Pay Day in Europe and although there have been equal pay days throughout the world since 1996, men still earn more than women. According to PayScale’s 2021 data, women make only $0.82 for every dollar a man makes, which is one cent more than they made in 2020. 

One of the stumbling blocks for women is the division of roles at home. It is this that Belgian agency, mortierbrigade, wants to highlight in its Equal Pay Day campaign with women’s movement, Zij-Kant, this year. 8 out of 10 Belgian women tackle the daily tasks of childcare, cooking and cleaning, the agency notes. In addition to their paid jobs, women around the world do about 75% of the unpaid work. The COVID-19 pandemic has only aggravated this unequal distribution of tasks.

Lockdowns removed childcare, kindergarten, school and grandparents from the childminding equation. Mums and dads were working from home – and looking after children, but instead of this being shared equally between parents, mums tended to bear the brunt of it. Pandemic parental leave has almost exclusively been taken by women (71%), according to the agency. Women’s careers and salaries have taken a hit as a result.

mortierbrigade’s message relies on real families. The campaign’s hero film shows children gatecrashing their parents’ video calls, pointing out that it’s cute if it happens once but not if it’s a daily event. For far more men than women, with or without lockdowns, children getting in the way of work is a daily event.