Did COVID-19 Affect the Division of Labor within the Household? Evidence from Two Waves of the Pandemic in Italy (original) (raw)
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IZA Journal of Labor Economics
The COVID-19 pandemic has had a dramatic impact on families’ lives because of the increased demands of housework and childcare. Much of the additional burden has been shouldered by women. Yet, the rise in remote working also has the potential to increase paternal involvement in family life and thus to reduce gender role inequalities. This effect depends on the working arrangements of each partner, whether working remotely, at their usual workplace, or ceasing work altogether. Using two waves of an ad-hoc survey conducted in April and November 2020, we show that the time spent by women in domestic activities did not depend on their partners’ working arrangements. Conversely, men spent fewer hours helping with housework and home schooling when their partners were at home. Although men who worked remotely or did not work at all devoted more time to household activities during the second wave of COVID-19, the increased time they spent at home did not seem to lead to a reallocation of co...
Canadian Review of Sociology, 2022
For many years, scholars have directed our attention to the gender gap in domestic labour. Even when women engage in paid employment, they nevertheless perform the majority of the household labour in most wealthy countries. At the same time, disasters and crises both expose and exacerbate existing social inequalities. In this paper, we ask: in what ways has the COVID−19 pandemic contributed to the gender gap in household labour, including childcare? How do women and men feel about this gap? Using data from the Canadian Perspectives survey series (Wave 3), conducted by Statistics Canada three months into the pandemic, our analyses consider the task distribution that made household labour intensely unequal during COVID−19, with women ten times more likely than men to say childcare fell mostly on them, for example. Yet, in nearly all of our models, women did not ubiquitously report being more dissatisfied with the division of domestic tasks within the house, nor were they more likely than men to say that the household division of labour "got worse" during COVID; however, parents did feel This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.
Italian Sociological Review, 10 (3S), 801-820, 2020
The paper illustrates the results of a qualitative study conducted in Italy during the lockdown, and aimed at investigating the consequences of remote work on work life balance and gender inequalities in t he division of paid and unpaid labor within heterosexual couples. Drawing from 20 online in depth interviews with 10 heterosexual couples, the paper highlights the expansion of work over other domains, which worsened with remote work. Even if for some inte rviewed men it was an occasion to experience a more involved fatherhood, for the majority of them a rethinking of their commitment in paid work is inconceivable. Conversely, mothers are more keen on considering job requests as negotiable and perceive a per vasive interference of work on family life, while their husbands often claim that childcare activities may reduce their productivity. Remote work does not allow the redefinition of the working models and does not improve the work life balance of interviewed couples, which is still considerably unbalanced towards job, with a limited space and time for individual activities. Moreover, remote work , even in this unprecedented extreme situation, does not modify gender normative roles within domestic domain and t hus it reproduces and sometimes exacerbates gender inequalities with women trying to balance their double role and fathers expanding the time devoted to work.
Women's Work, Housework and Childcare, Before and During Covid-19
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2020
Evidence from past economic crises indicates that recessions often affect men's and women's employment differently, with a greater impact on male-dominated sectors. The current COVID-19 crisis presents novel characteristics that have affected economic, health and social phenomena over wide swaths of the economy. Social distancing measures to combat the spread of the virus, such as working from home and school closures, have placed an additional tremendous burden on families. Using new survey data collected in April 2020 from a representative sample of Italian women, we analyse jointly the effect of COVID-19 on the working arrangements, housework and childcare of couples where both partners work. Our results show that most of the additional workload associated to COVID-19 falls on women while childcare activities are more equally shared within the couple than housework activities. According to our empirical estimates, changes to the amount of housework done by women during the emergency do not seem to depend on their partners' working arrangements. With the exception of those continuing to work at their usual place of work, all of the women surveyed spend more time on housework than before. In contrast, the amount of time men devote to housework does depend on their partners' working arrangements: men whose partners continue to work at their usual workplace spend more time on housework than before. The link between time devoted to childcare and working arrangements is more symmetric, with both women and men spending less time with their children if they continue to work away from home. For home schooling, too, parents who continue to go to their usual workplace after the lockdown are less likely to spend greater amounts of time with their children than before. Similar results emerge for our sample of women not working before the emergency. Finally, analysis of work-life balance satisfaction shows that working women with children aged 0-5 are those who say they find balancing work and family more difficult during COVID-19. The work-life balance is especially difficult to achieve for those with partners who continue to work outside the home during the emergency.
Who took care of what? The gender division of unpaid work during the first year of the COVID
Demographic Research, 2022
BACKGROUND France was one of the first countries implementing lockdown measures to mitigate the spread of COVID-19. Since families spent more time at home, household and care workloads increased significantly. However, existing findings are mixed in terms of whether this situation contributed to a more gender-egalitarian division of unpaid work. OBJECTIVE This paper explores the division of domestic work within couples across two different COVID-19 lockdowns and compares them to the out-of-lockdown period in France. We use the theoretical lenses of time availability, relative resources, and ‘doing gender’ to make sense of these changes. METHODS Our longitudinal analyses rely on an original panel study we collected in France between April 2020 and April 2021. It includes a sample of 1,959 observations (of 809 individuals living in couples). We employ the different types of restrictions to mobility and social life imposed during the first year of the pandemic as a contextual background, within which we measure the main drivers of change in the division of unpaid work within couples. We use individual fixed effect regression models to estimate changes in men’s share of unpaid work by time, changes in work conditions, partners’ educational gaps, and types of domestic tasks. RESULTS The first lockdown contributed to a slight rebalancing of unpaid work within couples. However, our results show an impact of both absolute and relative time availability on men’s share of unpaid work and that the overall rebalancing of unpaid work hides highly gendered patterns. Indeed, we find men doing more shopping and women doing more child care. This gendered division of labour is slightly more prevalent among couples in which the man is more educated than his partner. CONTRIBUTION Our findings suggest the reaffirmation of traditional gender roles even during the exceptional first year of the pandemic in France.
Gender and Well-Being Interactions between Work, Family and Public Policies
2007
Unpaid work in Italy is very unevenly distributed by gender with women bearing the main responsibility of care and housework even when they are employed. This paper investigates more in depth the uneven distribution of unpaid work in Italian couples by using a matched data set that allows us to analyse jointly different types of factors affecting unpaid working hours. By using this matched data set it is possible to relate unpaid work to family income and to analyse its distribution between the partners according to their employment conditions and family structure. According to this analysis women's perception of heaviness of unpaid work is higher when unpaid work is combined with paid working time as descriptive analysis on ISTAT multipurpose survey data show. Factors that contribute to a decrease in women's unpaid work in double earners families are related to women's employment condition. Women in bue collar positions employed in manufacturing do more hours of unpaid work and unpaid work increases at low income level. The latter can be connected to the attempt by women of increasing with their unpaid work household's well being at low income levels.
2007
A Comparative Gender Analysis of Italy, France, Sweden and the United States * This article analyses the extent to which changes in household composition over the life course affect the gender division of labour. It identifies and analyses cross-country disparities between France, Italy, Sweden and United States, using most recent data available from the Time Use National Surveys. We focus on gender differences in the allocation of time between market work, domestic work and leisure over the life-cycle. In order to map the lifecycle, we distinguish between nine key cross-country comparable life stages according to age and family structure such as exiting parental home, union formation, parenthood, and retiring from work. By using appropriate regression techniques (Tobit with selection, Tobit and OLS), we show large discrepancies in the gender division of labour at the different life stages. This gender gap exists in all countries at any stage of the life course, but is usually smaller at the two ends of the age distribution, and larger with parenthood. Beyond social norms, the impact of parenthood on time allocation varies across countries, being smaller in those where work-family balance policies are more effective and traditionally wellestablished.
Women's Investment in Career and Household Division of Labor
Social Science Research Network, 2016
The effects of women's strong investments in career on the intra-household division of labor, particularly the share of partners in domestic work, constitute important but unaddressed issues. We use the 2010 French Time Use survey, focusing on two-income couples. We first build indicators of female investment in career, measured in comparison to other similar women or to the woman's partner. We then investigate how the partners allocate time according to the intensity of women's investment. To achieve this objective, we estimate a five-equation model of domestic and labor market work by partners and the use of domestic help. We show that couples where women are invested in career tend to share tasks more equally. These women do less domestic work during weekdays. This diminution is partly compensated on weekends by their partners, but also slightly by women themselves on weekends when they invest more in their careers than their partners do. Also, when they are heavily invested in their careers compared to other women, they tend to use more often domestic help. However, even when women dedicate themselves more than their partners to their careers, women still spend more time on domestic tasks than their partners on average, implying no role reversal in the division of labor.
Will the Pandemic Transform the Gendered Division of Labor?
Pespectives, 2021
During this pandemic, 2.5 million women have le the workforce (compared to 1.8 million men). Women, who before the pandemic made up more than half the workforce, are now at their lowest workforce participation level since 1988. Women of color have been especially a ected. In January of 2021, for instance, the overall unemployment rate for women was 6.3% (double the prepandemic rate), but the rate for Asian women was 7.9%, for Black women 8.5%, and for Latina women 8.8%. White womenʼs unemployment rate was 5.1%. This exodus of women from the workplace was propelled in part by the gendered division of labor. We are all familiar with this division, even if we do not know it by that name. It describes the phenomenon whereby the bulk of unpaid domestic work is done by women whether or not they also do paid work outside the home. Unpaid domestic work includes housework, such as cleaning, cooking, shopping, and doing laundry, and caring work, such as feeding, dressing, bathing and transporting children, helping with homework, and assisting elderly parents. Recent data show that, in the U.S., women who are married to, or cohabitating with, a man do about two-thirds of all routine household tasks. In OECD countries, fathers, on average, spend less than half the time caring for children than their employed female partners do. According to a 2018 Oxfam report, women around the world do between two and 10 times as much unpaid domestic work as men. The global value of this work is estimated to be $10 trillion per year. In addition to performing most of the domestic labor, women typically also carry what is called the "mental load"-the invisible work involved in managing a household and a family. This work includes such tasks as planning meals, making doctorʼs appointments, signing up for parentteacher conferences, organizing birthday parties, registering for summer camp, finding babysitters, and so on. Moreover, mothers in heterosexual partnerships are typically the "default parent." This