The role of children and work-from-home in gender labor market asymmetries: evidence from the COVID-19 pandemic in Latin America (original) (raw)
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Women's Labor Force Exits during COVID-19: Differences by Motherhood, Race, and Ethnicity
Finance and Economics Discussion Series, 2021
In this paper, we study declines in women’s labor force participation by race and ethnicity as well as the presence of children. We find that increases in labor force exits were larger for Black women, Latinas, and women living with children. In particular, we find larger increases in pandemic-era labor force exits among women living with children under age 6 and among lower-earning women living with school-age children after controlling for detailed job and demographic characteristics. Latinas and Black women also had larger increases in labor force exits during the pandemic relative to White women. Differences in the presence of children and household structure explain one-quarter of the excess labor force exits among women of color.
Journal of Family Research, 2021
Objective: In this project, we study changes in the working hours of men and women with and without children in the early phase of the COVID-19 crisis in Germany until August 2020. Background: The COVID-19 outbreak in Europe led to a sharp decrease in economic activity, along with temporary closures of childcare facilities and schools. Subsequent changes in working hours in the early phase of the pandemic and during summer 2020 may have contributed to inequalities between men and women or parents and non-parents respectively. Method: We use a unique panel dataset containing monthly survey data of the Institute for Employment Research (the IAB-HOPP) combined with administrative data of the German Federal Employment Agency. We run regression models with the change in working hours (before the crisis vs. working time at each panel wave) as the dependent variable and gender, parental status, and childcare arrangement as the main independent variables. Results: We observe a comparable re...
COVID-19 and the role of gender, earnings, and telecommuting in parents' employment
Journal of Marriage and Family , 2023
Objective: To understand how married mothers’ and fathers’ earnings and ability to telecommute structured their employment throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Background: We weigh two competing explanations— rational choice and gendered resources—to evaluate the association between married parents’ financial and workplace resources and sustained employment throughout the pandemic. Method: We use hierarchical logistic regression models to analyze rotating panel data from the current population survey for respondents in dual-earner, different-sex marriages who are aged 25 to 54 with children 12 years or younger from January 2020 through August 2021. We restrict our analysis to those who were employed prior to the start of the pandemic to isolate pandemic-related exits. Results: We find that being the primary earner (i.e., earning at least half of the household income) prior to the start of the pandemic did not protect mothers from employment exits during the pandemic. Fathers’ primary earner status did help sustain their employment. In contrast, access to telecommuting was an important resource to help sustain mothers’ work attachment throughout the pandemic but had little association with fathers’ employment. Conclusion: Rational choice explanations help explain married fathers’ but not mothers’ employment during the pandemic. Gendered resources better explain mothers’ employment. Mothers who were primary earners were still pulled away from employment as caregiving demands grew during the pandemic. Telecommuting supported mothers’ employment by offering flexibility in addressing these competing work and family demands, but not by challenging conventional gender divisions of labor among different-sex couples.
2021
Working from home (WFH) has become a key factor during the COVID-19 pandemic, especially in countries that have implemented severe social distancing measures. This paper investigates the potential influence of the working from home attitude of occupations on the gender wage gap (GWG) reported by Italian employees, on average and along the distribution. Based on Oaxaca–Blinder decompositions and unconditional quantile regressions, our results show that the GWG is greater among females working in an occupation with a high level of WFH attitude, thus among those more likely to be affected by a (probably) persistent spread of WFH procedures after the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition, we find evidence of both sticky floor and glass ceiling effects for employees with a high WFH attitude and only a sticky floor effect for the group with a low WFH attitude. The positive association revealed between the level of WFH attitude and the GWG appears particularly strong among older and married femal...
THE ECONOMICS AND FINANCE EFFECTS OF THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC, 2021
The objective is to analyze the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the dynamics of the Mexican labor market (formal-informal employment) by gender. It is built consistent micro-founded time-series from 1987:Q1 to 2019:Q4 using the Mexican urban employment surveys and estimate a VAR model linking aggregate production and each market segment. Our results suggest significant adverse effects on formal employment resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, with lengthy job recovery for females and males. The informal sector in both genders presents a lower forecasted response to the initial production shock but substantial observed employment losses, potentially linked to structural changes in the market. In the COVID-19 crisis, the informal sector is not a substitute for formal employment losses. The complexity of this crisis suggests crafting policies to improve the easiness of the market to enhance formal job recovery while promoting gender equality. Our main contribution is to estimate the diverse employment losses by segments and a critical structural change in the labor market dynamics resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic focusing on urban employment. JEL Classification: E24, E26, J21 J82. Keywords: COVID-19, informality, gender gap employment, Mexico, impulse response function.
COVID-19 and the Gender Gap in Work Hours
Gender, Work & Organization, 2020
School and daycare closures due to the COVID-19 pandemic have increased caregiving responsibilities for working parents. As a result, many have changed their work hours to meet these growing demands. In this study, we use panel data from the U.S. Current Population Survey to examine changes in mothers’ and fathers’ work hours from February through April, 2020, the period of time prior to the widespread COVID-19 outbreak in the U.S. and through its first peak. Using person-level fixed effects models, we find that mothers with young children have reduced their work hours four to five times more than fathers. Consequently, the gender gap in work hours has grown by 20 to 50 percent. These findings indicate yet another negative consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic, highlighting the challenges it poses to women’s work hours and employment.
Telework, Childcare, and Mothers' Labor Supply
2021
We study the impact of increased pandemic-related childcare responsibilities on custodial mothers by telework compatibility of their job. We estimate changes in employment outcomes of these mothers in a difference-indifference framework relative to prime-age women without children and a triple-difference framework relative to prime-age custodial fathers. Mothers' labor force participation decreased between 0.1 to 1.5 percentage points (ppts) relative to women without dependent children and 0.3 to 2.0 ppts compared to custodial fathers. Conditional on being in the labor force, the probability of being unemployed fell by 0.7 ppts relative to childless women. Conditional on being employed, leave take-up increased by 0.7 ppts. These patterns were especially prominent among custodial mothers with a college degree or higher in telework-compatible jobs. Compared to women without children, mothers working as teachers and white-collar workers disproportionately left the labor market at the end of the 2020-2021 virtual school year. These mothers likely struggled balancing remote work while simultaneously supporting their children's virtual schooling needs. The disparity between mothers and fathers widened over time, indicating the prevalence of inequality in sharing household duties even today. By the start of the 2021-2022 school year, eighteen months after the pandemic began, mothers' employment was still adversely impacted by childcare disruptions. Our findings emphasize that while flexible work has been shown to increase women's labor supply, it is not sufficient to ensure continued and increasing levels of women's labor force participation if accessible and affordable childcare is unavailable while they work for pay.
Motherhood and the missing women in the labor market
2018
Motherhood currently stands out as a key determinant of the gender gap in labor market outcomes. Studies identifying the effect of children have mostly focused in Europe and the US. These results may not be extrapolated to developing countries with different institutional settings and cultural norms. In this paper we estimate the impact of becoming a mother on various labor outcomes in Chile. Following an event-study methodology we show that motherhood implies a drastic reduction in earnings, explained by a drop in labor supply, both in the extensive and intensive margins. These changes persist even ten years after the first child is born. No child penalties are found for fathers, neither in the short nor in the long run. The results for mothers are driven by a decline in formal employment, leading to an increase in informality rates among them. Finally, we find that effects are stronger for less educated mothers, indicating that education is a buffer for this type of child penalty....
Who worked from home in Brazil? Inequalities highlighted by the pandemic
Nova Economia, 2021
There is some consensus that the pandemic can widen pre-existing inequalities in the labor market and that an essential issue concerns the unequal possibilities of working remotely. This study analyzes inequalities in remote work in Brazil through descriptive analyzes and Probit regressions using PNAD COVID-19 microdata. We have found that workers with the least possibilities for remote work were the poorest, males, rural residents, non-whites, youngest, without college education, self-employed or wage workers from the private sector and agriculture workers. An important part of that stems from differences in selection into occupations; however, some variables maintained important independent effects, especially the college education and the labor income. The pandemic, regarding the possibility of remote work, had the effect of widening the existing inequalities, favoring the wealthier, more educated, and more formalized workers and imposing on the others the need to choose between ...