Originally published here.
By leveraging the UK COVID-19 lockdown, this paper examines the impact of changes in paid working hours on gender inequality, specifically time devoted to housework and childcare. We compare potential outcomes of similar couples who only differed in partners’ losing (or maintaining) paid hours during the period from January/February 2020 to April 2020. We draw on wave 9 of the UK Household Longitudinal Study and the first wave of the Understanding Society COVID-19 study to evaluate competing hypotheses derived from time availability, relative resources and ‘doing gender’ perspectives.
Following studies on the gendered division of unpaid labour, we also account for heterogeneous implications by analysing couples where partners’ relative contributions to household labour income differ by gender. Our empirical results indicate that both men and women who lost paid hours increased the time devoted to domestic chores, but gender inequality strikes back, especially after breadwinner women lose paid hours. Overall, this paper provides fruitful insights into how theories of gender inequality in the division of domestic tasks could benefit from research on labour market shocks.
Shortly after the COVID-19 outbreak, a vivid debate was sparked in social science research over gender inequality in the exposure to the crisis and its negative consequences, whether health-related (Sobotka, Brzozowska, Muttarak, Zeman, & di Lego, 2020; Wenham, Smith, & Morgan, 2020) or socio-economic (Alon, Doepke, Olmstead-Rumsey, & Tertilt, 2020; Kristal & Yaish, 2020). Among the second group, a specific subfield of research has concentrated on the division of housework and childcare (e.g., Carlson, Petts, & Pepin, 2020).
In the UK, COVID-19 lockdown measures had an unprecedented impact on family daily lives. From 23 March and throughout April 2020, working outside the home was permitted only for ‘key workers’, whose tasks could not be easily shifted to home-working. In addition, childcare and schools were closed, except for children of (at least one) key worker and vulnerable children. Social distancing, ‘stay-at-home’ measures and connected closures of public places and non-essential shops inevitably affected working arrangements. A large majority of workers experienced changes in their working hours, as a common by-product of unemployment, furlough or home-working. According to the official figures (Office for National Statistics, 2020), in April almost 30 % of the entire workforce was furloughed, 50 % moved to home-working and about 1 million people claimed Universal Credit and Jobseeker’s Allowance benefits. Research on the UK lockdown has estimated a 30 % generalized reduction in paid working hours, with men losing more hours (Zhou, Hertog, Kolpashnikova, & Man-Yee, 2020). Given the strong instruction to remain at home, inevitably these hours were spent there. In turn, this must have had implications in terms of time available for carrying out domestic tasks, magnified by the fact of being left with no alternative activities outside the house.
In this work, we contribute to extant research by investigating how the April 2020 lockdown affected the use of time within couples and how time spent on domestic tasks was allocated. We consider how different combinations of changes in working hours led to rearranging the time division of household chores. Moreover, since studies of inequalities have highlighted how the interplay of partners’ resources within couples can vary (Dieckhoff, Gash, Mertens, & Romeu Gordo, 2020; Grotti & Scherer, 2016; Vitali & Arpino, 2016; Vitali & Mendola, 2014), we assess the extent to which the possible renegotiation differed depending on the partners’ contributions to household labour income, distinguishing male breadwinner, female breadwinner and couples earning similar amounts.
This work is theoretically informed by, and aims to contribute to, the long tradition of research into gender inequality in domestic labour, focusing on a particularly interesting context. Owing to the liberal model of its welfare state, the UK is characterized by limited welfare support and by the market being the main provider of services. This country also shows comparatively high rates of female participation in the labour market. Nevertheless, despite initiatives aiming to facilitate work–life balance and to increase equality between men and women, gender inequality seems to persist – within households as much as outside them.
Our contribution is an empirical investigation of three diverging theoretical frameworks on the division of housework and childcare: time availability, relative resources and ‘doing gender’. While investigating how gender equality in domestic labour evolved during the UK’s first COVID-19 lockdown, we aim to contribute more broadly to research on the link between transitions and changes in labour market conditions and gender inequality in household chores.
In this paper, a short-term empirical research is built on a long literature on gender inequality in housework and childcare. The original contribution is, therefore, twofold. First, we document the immediate consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic on the gendered division of unpaid labour in the UK. In doing so, some limits of existing research are overcome by theoretically considering and empirically modelling pre-existing family arrangements and gender-based structures of inequality. Second, we add to the literature on gender inequality in domestic labour by testing the relevance of different theoretical perspectives during an unusual situation of major labour market alterations.
We examined the impact of a reduction in paid working hours on how couples allocated domestic tasks during the first UK COVID-19 lockdown. By comparing potential outcomes for couples in which only the partners’ involvement in paid work changed, we provided estimates about the gendered division of housework and childcare in a context of sudden labour market changes. While a reduction in paid hours may represent a proxy to test the time availability perspective, we separately analysed couples where one partner or the other was the main breadwinner, and those in which the partners’ jobs bring in similar amounts, to address the relative resources and ‘doing gender’ theses.
On one side, there appeared to be a degree of rationality in heterosexual couples’ (re-)allocation of time in paid and unpaid labour, supporting the time availability thesis. Indeed, men and women who lost working hours during the pandemic dedicated a larger share of their time to housework and childcare. As previous research has found, childcare was shared more equally than housework, mainly due to the increased contribution of fathers whose paid hourse reduce. On the other hand, allocation in families where the man is the main breadwinner was not inconsistent with the relative resources perspective. In such families, the woman was found to spend a much larger share of the time devoted by the couple to housework and childcare, even when her male partner lost working hours.
It is noticeable that unpaid labour, particularly housework, remains a female responsibility in all the scenarios addressed. Moreover, gender gaps in marginal differences from the reference condition clearly show women committing more of their time to domestic tasks when their paid hours reduced. This result was particularly evident in households where the woman is the chief breadwinner, in which the time availability and the relative resources perspectives are clearly inadequate; it suggests the likely presence of ‘doing gender’ mechanisms.
We expected such mechanisms to become evident in situations diverging from traditional gender roles, which we identified as men losing paid hours and ‘female breadwinner’ households. However, no evidence in favour of the ‘doing gender’ thesis was found after men lost paid hours, in any of our three types of household (‘male breadwinner’, ‘female breadwinner’ and partners’ earnings similar). We suspect this may be attributable to the sudden and relatively exogenous labour market shock that the pandemic represents, which may not have been perceived as a strong deviation from normative roles – as would be the case for job loss or unemployment in more normal circumstances (as found, e.g., by Bittman et al., 2003). Most strikingly, breadwinner women whose paid work reduced reacted by disproportionally increasing the share of housework they contributed. This may suggest that they do not have (or do not make use of) their bargaining power, as the relative resources thesis would suggest. Instead, they tend to get back to their normative role as caregivers as soon as their ‘dominant’ and ‘deviant’ labour market position is jeopardized.
All our results also point to important differences between housework and childcare. Childcare appears to be shared between partners more equally in virtually all scenarios we considered. Furthermore, fathers seemed to significantly increase the share of time they spent with children after losing paid hours. This was found in all three types of household, but it is particularly evident in ‘female breadwinner’ households. The more gender-egalitarian division of childcare is not a new finding. Past studies often suggest childcare offers more pleasant activities than housework (Deutsch et al., 1993). Moreover, time spent with children is more rewarding for parents (Craig & Mullan, 2011), especially in terms of self-identity, self-esteem and well-being (Coltrane, 2000; Sullivan, 2013). Some have also highlighted the higher costs of neglecting childcare as one reason for its more equal share among parents (Deutsch et al., 1993). We suspect that the latter argument, together with the difficulty of outsourcing this activity, particularly fits the lockdown situation.
Moreover, the slightly greater involvement of fathers in housework after their paid hours reduced (as suggested by our robustness checks in Appendix D) seem to point to relevant differences not only between housework and childcare, but also between couples with and without children. If couples with children share all types of domestic tasks more gender-equally following a labour market shock, this may reflect difficulty in making use of bargaining power or ‘doing gender’ in a situation of exceptional increase in the total quantity of housework and childcare to be performed.
This contribution comes with some limitations, which mostly stem from the data. First of all, survey responses on time spent in housework and childcare are measured in hours and refer to the past week. This is likely to measure time imprecisely (compared, say, to time-use diaries reporting minutes) and is potentially subject to recall bias (even though the period recalled is relatively recent). Moreover, the Understanding Society survey does not ask for detailed information about specific tasks performed, which would help to distinguish between gender-neutral and gender-typical chores (e.g., within the ‘housework’ category, putting up shelves or repairs are often considered ‘masculine’ tasks, while ironing or cleaning are ‘feminine’ ones).
Whether our findings on the first COVID-19 lockdown in the UK could be generalized to other countries exceeds the aims of this paper – even though this kind of ‘stay-at-home’ lockdown has been adopted in other countries with similar degrees of strictness and rapidity. We argue that the relevance of our findings does not lie in the assessment of gender inequality during the pandemic, but rather in documenting short-term reduction, or persistence, of gender inequality in the domestic sphere after unprecedented labour market shocks.
You can read the complete article here.