Parenthood is often considered a major factor behind gender differences in time allocation, especially between paid work and housework. This article investigates the impact of parenthood on men’s and women’s daily time use in Sweden and how it changed over the 1990s. The analysis is made using time diary data from the Multinational Time Use Survey (MTUS; N = 13,729) and multivariate Tobit regressions. The results indicate that while parenthood in 1990 – 1991 clearly strengthened the traditional gender division of labor in the household, this was much less the case in 2000 – 2001, when parenthood affected men and women in a more similar way.

Having young children generally intensifies gendered patterns of time use. During the 1990s, this pattern changed in several Nordic countries, where welfare state arrangements support gender equality and workfamily balance more comprehensively than elsewhere. We investigate the impact of parenthood on men's and women's time use across welfare state regimes, performing ordinary least squares regressions using data from the Multinational Time Use Study for Germany, Italy, and Canada (N = 57,367 weekdays/53,292 weekends). We find convergence of men's and women's time use over the 1990s but uncover no strong evidence of the Nordic pattern emerging elsewhere. Instead, in countries with less comprehensive family policies and less support for gender equality, parenthood continued to reinforce traditional patterns of behavior on weekdays. There is evidence of change on weekends in Germany and Canada, where fathers became more involved domestically, but not in Italy, suggesting certain welfare state regimes may preserve gendered behavior more than others.

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Copyright is held by the author(s). Lund Papers in Economic Demography are circulated for discussion and have not been peer-reviewed or reviewed by the Centre for Economic Demography. The views expressed are those of the author(s). CENTRE FOR ECONOMIC DEMOGRAPHY The Centre for Economic Demography (CED), established in 2006 as a Linnaeus Centre of Excellence, is a multidisciplinary research centre at Lund University with members from the School of Economics and Management, the Faculty of Medicine and the Faculty of Social Sciences. The mission of CED is to promote research and training in population studies. Researchers at the Centre study demographic issues from different perspectives and in a variety of contexts across time and space. More information at www.ed.lu.

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