Childcare and housework during the first lockdown in Austria: Traditional division or new roles?

Abstract

Objective: This study analyses how much time mothers and fathers spent on childcare and housework during and after the first COVID-19 lockdown in Austria (starting in mid-March 2020) and how they distributed that time between themselves.
 Background: Parents needed to reallocate care work between themselves as, on the one hand, kindergartens and schools closed for two months and, on the other hand, employment-related changes arose, e.g., working from home. The results are discussed in light of major theories that address the division of care work: the time availability approach and gender role theory.
 Method: This study employs data from the Austrian Corona Panel Project 2020/21, a web-based survey using quota sampling, which started in the second week of the first lockdown (n=372 for respondents in couples with children below age 15). Altogether, seven waves contain information about time spent on childcare and housework; three were conducted during or right after the first lockdown (April and May 2020) and four between June 2020 and February 2021. Linear and logistic regression models were used.
 Results: Within the whole study period, parents’ total workload (care work and employment) was highest during the first lockdown. The workload was greatest—an average of 15 hours on weekdays—among mothers with children below age six. While mothers shouldered more care work in most families, partners shared tasks equally in around one third of them. Care time depended on employment hours, especially for fathers. Yet, it was higher for mothers with the same level of employment as fathers.
 Conclusion: The COVID-19-related employment changes led to a rise in arrangements that rarely existed before in Austria, e.g., fathers working part-time. Consequently, some fathers took on new roles, especially when they worked from home (mostly among the higher educated), were non-employed (mostly among the lower educated) or worked part-time. The paper concludes by discussing whether those experiences may permanently result in more egalitarian gender roles.

Poor labour market prospects due to intensive caregiving? Childcare and eldercare among welfare recipients in Germany

“…This recent research showed ambiguous results (for an overview, see Jessen et al, 2022). For Germany, some studies found that men spent more time on caregiving that is related to changes in work arrangements and rising possibilities of teleworking (Berghammer, 2022; Jessen et al, 2022, for Austria), but most studies agree that mothers still took on the central role in childcare during the pandemic. Others detected that unpaid care intensity among (unemployed) women and the corresponding gender inequalities had increased (Camiletti & Nesbitt‐Ahmed, 2022; Corsi & Ilkkaracan, 2022; Hank & Steinbach, 2021).…”

Review article: Parenting leaves, workplace characteristics, male health, and the pandemic: Currents in policy-related fatherhood research in higher income countries

“…A general consensus across many countries is that additional childcare responsibilities fell disproportionately on mothers, who increased their already higher amounts of childcare, but that fathers also increased time spent on childcare compared to before the pandemic (Craig & Churchill, 2021;Hank & Steinbach, 2021;Kreyenfeld & Zinn, 2021;Mangiavacchi et al, 2021;Margaria, 2021;Shafer et al, 2020). Some researchers have found that fathers took on new roles as parents tried to figure out ways of working and home schooling (Berghammer, 2021;Petts et al, 2021). The next question will be to consider the longer-term consolidation of these new roles.…”

“…Collins et al, 2021;Hipp & Brünning, 2021;Yerkes et al, 2020). Many studies have concluded that despite changes to childcare time, the pandemic has rather reinforced the gendered division of work and sent us backwards in this regard (Berghammer, 2021;Blum & Dobrotić, 2022, Cheng et al, 2021Farré et al, 2020).…”

Career, Covid-19, and Care: (Gendered) Impacts of the Pandemic on the Work of Communication Scholars

“…The sharing of professional and care work, which is always gendered, inevitably had to be renegotiated after the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in the spring of 2020, especially during the imposed containment measures. Numerous studies and research findings indicate a "re-traditionalization" (Allmendinger, 2020) regarding gender roles and a gender-specific division of labor as care work is borne primarily by women (e.g., Berghammer, 2022;Craig, 2020). Professionals who were expected to remain in their home office during the pandemic were particularly challenged because they also had to manage childcare, homeschooling, and housework in the time they normally had exclusively for professional obligations.…”