Gender, Parenting, and The Rise of Remote Work During the Pandemic: Implications for Domestic Inequality in the United States (original) (raw)
SSRN Electronic Journal
In 2020, parents' work-from-home days increased fourfold following the initial COVID-19 pandemic lockdown period compared to 2015-2019. At the same time, many daycares closed, and the majority of public schools offered virtual or hybrid classrooms, increasing the demand for household-provided childcare. Using time diaries from American Time Use Survey (ATUS) and looking at parents in dual-earner couples, we examine parents' weekday workday time allocated to paid work, chores, and childcare in the COVID-19 era by the couple's joint work location arrangements. We determine the work location of the ATUS respondent directly from their diary and proxy the partner's work-from-home status using the share of workers reporting work from home in their occupation. When their partners worked onsite, mothers and fathers working from home spent more time on childcare, especially mothers, compared to those on-site; fathers spent more time on household chores. However, only mothers' total unpaid and paid work burden was higher. In the fall, fathers working from home worked substantially fewer paid hours and spent even more time on household production. When both parents worked from home compared to both worked on-site, mothers and fathers working from home worked roughly equally fewer paid hours and did more secondary childcare, though fathers did more household production, suggesting they shared the increased work burden resulting from the pandemic more equally. However, in the fall, only mothers did more childcare when both worked from home. We also find that mothers spread their work throughout the day when working from home.
Journal of Experimental Political Science
By exacerbating a pre-existing crisis of childcare in the United States, the COVID-19 pandemic forced many parents to renegotiate household arrangements. What shapes parents’ preferences over different arrangements? In an online conjoint experiment, we assess how childcare availability, work status and earnings, and the intra-household division of labor shape heterosexual American parents’ preferences over different situations. We find that while mothers and fathers equally value outside options for childcare, the lack of such options – a significant feature of the pandemic – does not significantly change their evaluations of other features of household arrangements. Parents’ preferences over employment, earnings, and how to divide up household labor exhibit gendered patterns, which persist regardless of childcare availability. By illustrating the micro-foundations of household decision-making under constraints, our findings help to make sense of women’s retrenchment from the labor ...
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.
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.
Gender Inequality and the Division of Labor in the Home During Covid-19: A Literature Review
The current Covid-19 pandemic has dramatically impacted families in the United States as working parents face increased demand for domestic labor at home while losing community and institutional support through pandemic closures. By integrating emerging research on gender norms and expectations regarding the division of household labor for working parents, the impact of Covid-19 on working mothers, and the gendered impact of infrastructure and the pandemic response in the United States, I aim to provide a holistic conceptualization and analysis of gender inequality and the division of labor in the home during the Covid-19 pandemic. Through summarizing and analyzing current literature, this review will contribute to new developments for future exploration in policy and practice and offer a framework for supporting families and working mothers as we move forward in the world of Covid-19.
Canadian Review Of Sociology/revue Canadienne De Sociologie, 2020
The COVID-19 pandemic created rapid, wide-ranging, and significant disruptions to work and family life. Accordingly, these dramatic changes may have reshaped parents' gendered division of labor in the short term. Using data from 1,234 Canadian parents in different-sex relationships, we compare retrospective reports of perceived sharing in how housework and childcare tasks were split prior to the declaration of the pandemic to assessments of equality afterward. Further, we describe perceptions of changes in fathers' engagement in these tasks overall, by respondent gender, and by employment arrangements before and during the pandemic. Results indicate small shifts toward a more equal division of labor in the early "lockdown" months, with increased participation in housework and childcare by fathers, supporting the needs exposure hypothesis. We conclude by discussing gender differences in parents' reports and potential implications for longer term gender equality. Résumé La pandémie COVID-19 a provoqué des perturbations rapides, vastes et importantes dans le travail et la vie de famille. En conséquence, ces changements dramatiques peuvent avoir remodelé la division parentale du travail entre les sexes à court terme. À l'aide de données provenant de
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.
Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World, 2021
Mothers did a disproportionate share of the child care during the COVID-19 pandemic—an arrangement that negatively impacted their careers, relationships, and well-being. How did mothers account for these unequal roles? Through interviews and surveys with 55 mothers (and 14 fathers) in different-sex, prepandemic dual-earner couples, we found that mothers (and fathers) justified unequal parenting arrangements based on gendered structural and cultural conditions that made mothers’ disproportionate labor seem “practical” and “natural.” These justifications allowed couples to rely on mothers by default rather than through active negotiation. As a result, many mothers did not feel entitled to seek support with child care from fathers or nonparental caregivers and experienced guilt if they did so. These findings help explain why many mothers have not reentered the workforce, why fathers’ involvement at home waned as the pandemic progressed, and why the pandemic led to growing preferences f...
2020
Drawing on data from the Socio-economic Panel (SOEP) for 2018, we use a sample of 2,145 heterosexual couples with children below age 13 to investigate the paternal involvement in domestic childcare and the relation of the underlying mechanisms to the two job-related “Covid-19 factors” systemic relevance (SR) and capacity to work from home (WfH). Based on bi- and trivariate analyses of the intra-couple distribution of time, income and gender roles before the crisis and their likely change during the pandemic depending on parents’ job characteristics SR and WfH, we nominate three couple constellations which are most likely to manifest an increase in the proportion of paternal childcare in the post-pandemic period. Depending on the specification of access to emergency care, we quantify a share of 7-8% of couples as ’sources of hope‘. We further expect positive impulses for gender equality not only in the private but also in the corporate sphere, especially through multiplier effects, w...
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.
Gender, Work & Organization, 2022
Has COVID-19 changed gender-and parental-status-specific differences in working from home? To answer this question, we used data from the Institute for Employment Research High-Frequency Online Personal Panel collected in Germany in the early stages of the pandemic (May-August 2020). Regression analyses revealed changes in pre-pandemic gender-and parental-status-specific differences in remote working-not only when strict social distancing measures were in place, but also after they were lifted: Fathers were no longer more likely than childless men and women to work remotely, and women were no longer more likely than men to work more hours from home when using this arrangement. Further, the results suggest that cultural barriers in organizations to working from home-which were especially prevalent for mothers before the pandemic-have decreased.
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...
When Paid Work Invades the Family: Single Mothers in the COVID-19 Pandemic
Journal of Family Issues, 2020
The Novel COVID-19 pandemic has dissolved the spatial distinction between production/workplace and reproduction/home. With essential services like childcare and public schools either shut down or dramatically curtailed, families have been stretched to the breaking point. Nowhere is the stress greater than among single mothers. This paper presents the results of a survey of single mothers who live alone with their children and single mothers who live in multi-adult households. We focus on three questions relevant to the situation faced by single mothers: (a) Does the experience of having created a support network prior to becoming a single mother mitigate the impact of the pandemic on single mothers? (b) Will the weight of daycare for preschool and school age children lead single mothers to look for new ways to organize their households? (c) More generally, will the antagonism between production and reproduction be altered as a result of the pandemic?
Working from Home During Covid-19 Pandemic and Changes to Fertility Intentions Among Parents
European Journal of Population
The Covid-19 pandemic and related massive spread of home based work led to substantial changes in the conditions for combining work and childbearing. On the one hand, working from home helped parents to accommodate increased childcare needs during the pandemic. On the other hand, it led to acute experiences of blurred boundaries between work and family life during childcare and school closures. Therefore, the direction of the impact of working from home on fertility intentions during the pandemic is not unequivocal. In this paper, we investigate how working from home was related to change in fertility intentions of mothers and fathers during the pandemic and discuss the complex mechanisms behind these relationships. With the use of unique Familydemic Survey data from a representative sample of parents in Poland, we estimate multinomial logit regressions by gender and consider a set of potential moderators, including financial well-being, gender relations, and occupational characteri...
Journal of Gender Studies, 2020
The Covid-19 pandemic and the strategies implemented to deal with it have had economic and societal repercussions all over the world. In India, a nationwide lockdown was initiated on 25 March 2020 which continued in a diluted form as we were conducting the interviews for the paper in July 2020. The lockdown brought activities outside the home to a standstill and people were expected to stay indoors in order to ensure social distancing and break the chain of infection. The lockdown sparked its own problems and triggered discussions on issues including economic hardship and domestic violence. The question of how domestic responsibilities are shared among adults in families has also come to the forefront of debate. As hired part-time help was discontinued under lockdown, parents who had hitherto outsourced childcare and housework were suddenly left to fend for themselves. This article attempts to explore the manner in which such unpaid domestic responsibilities, especially childcare, were shared between parents in middle-class homes. The gendered nature of this division of housework and care work, and its varied implications on the paid work and careers of mothers and fathers, is the focus of inquiry.
Gender and Society, 2021
The COVID-19 pandemic has upended in-person public education across the United States, a critical infrastructure of care that parents—especially mothers—depend on to work. To understand the nature and magnitude of school closures across states, we collected detailed primary data—the Elementary School Operating Status database (ESOS)—to measure the percentage of school districts offering in-person, remote, and hybrid instruction models for elementary schools by state in September 2020. We link these data to the Current Population Survey to evaluate the association between school reopening and parents’ labor force participation rates, comparing 2020 labor force participation rates to those observed prepandemic in 2019. We find that, across states, the maternal labor force participation rate fell to a greater extent than that of fathers. In 2019, mothers’ rate of labor force participation was about 18 percentage points lower than fathers’. By 2020, this gap grew by 5 percentage points in states where schools offered primarily remote instruction. We show that schools are a vital source of care for young children, and that without in-person instruction, mothers have been sidelined from the labor force. The longer these conditions remain in place, the more difficult it may be for mothers to fully recover from prolonged spells of nonemployment, resulting in reduced occupational opportunities and lifetime earnings.
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
Early Signs Indicate That COVID-19 Is Exacerbating Gender Inequality in the Labor Force
Socius, 2021
In this data visualization, the authors examine how the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) crisis in the United States has affected labor force participation, unemployment, and work hours across gender and parental status. Using data from the Current Population Survey, the authors compare estimates between February and April 2020 to examine the period of time before the COVID-19 outbreak in the United States to the height of the first wave, when stay-at-home orders were issued across the country. The findings illustrate that women, particularly mothers, have employment disproportionately affected by COVID-19. Mothers are more likely than fathers to exit the labor force and become unemployed. Among heterosexual married couples of which both partners work in telecommutingcapable occupations, mothers have scaled back their work hours to a far greater extent than fathers. These patterns suggest that the COVID-19 crisis is already worsening existing gender inequality, with long-term implications for women's employment.
Frontiers in Psychology, 2022
Empirical evidence from the COVID-19 pandemic shows that women carried the major burden of additional housework in families. In a mixed-methods study, we investigate female and male remote workers’ experiences of working from home (WFH) during the pandemic. We used the free association technique to uncover remote workers’ representations about WFH (i.e., workers’ reflection of subjective experiences). Based on a sample of 283 Austrian remote workers cohabitating with their intimate partners our findings revealed that in line with traditional social roles, men and women in parent roles are likely to experience WFH differently: Mothers’ representations about WFH emphasize perceived incompatibility between the work and non-work sphere whereas fathers’ representations highlight work-family facilitation of WFH. However, gender differences were also prevalent for women and men without children: Women seem to particularly benefit from more concentration at home, whereas men consider WFH as more efficient, practical and leading to less work. Thus, our findings imply that gender affected perceptions of WFH during the pandemic independently from children, but children seemed to increase the existing burden, in particular for women. To conclude, WFH can generally be seen as an enabler to reduce work-life/family conflict for both women and men, but bears different challenges based on the contextual (family) situation.