Home, sweet home? The impact of working from home on the division of unpaid work during the COVID-19 lockdown

Abstract

A lockdown implies a shift from the public to the private sphere, and from market to non-market production, thereby increasing the volume of unpaid work. Already before the pandemic, unpaid work was disproportionately borne by women. This paper studies the effect of working from home for pay (WFH), due to a lockdown, on the change in the division of housework and childcare within couple households. While previous studies on the effect of WFH on the reconciliation of work and family life and the division of labour within the household suffered from selection bias, we are able to identify this effect by drawing upon the shock of the first COVID-19 lockdown in Austria. The corresponding legal measures left little choice over WFH. In any case, WFH is exogenous, conditional on a small set of individual and household characteristics we control for. We employ data from a survey on the gendered aspects of the lockdown. The dataset includes detailed information on time use during the lockdown and on the quality and experience of WFH. Uniquely, this survey data also includes information on the division, and not only magnitude, of unpaid work within households. Austria is an interesting case in this respect as it is characterized by very conservative gender norms. The results reveal that the probability of men taking on a larger share of housework increases if men are WFH alone or together with their female partner. By contrast, the involvement of men in childcare increased only in the event that the female partner was not able to WFH. Overall, the burden of childcare, and particularly homeschooling, was disproportionately borne by women.

COVID-19 and gender inequity in science: Consistent harm over time

“…In this unequal context, the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak has left women worse off and increased the amount of unpaid work-such as child and eldercare-they are expected to do [9,10]. While fathers report increased household chores during the pandemic, mothers increased their childcare and homeschooling responsibilities [11]. One study found that working mothers in the U.K. were 5 percentage points more likely to reduce working hours and 7% more likely to adjust their work patterns than working fathers [9].…”

The significance of occupations, family responsibilities, and gender for working from home: Lessons from COVID-19

“…Overall, this means that the division of domestic labor remains at least as unequal as it was prior to the pandemic. This striking degree of stability in the aggregate does not mean that there may not have been more pronounced changes for certain subgroups of couples: The increased contributions of male partners seem to be driven mainly by constellations with mothers with a strong labor market attachment without the option to work from home [ 33 , 36 ]. Another German study detected some shift toward the extreme end of the distribution where mothers take over childcare and housework almost completely [ 37 ].…”

Big changes in daily activities across the course of the UK pandemic; but which of them will stick?

“…The ATUS is of exceptional quality and should prove a useful comparative resource for studying the effects of the pandemic on daily behaviour in the USA. Other time use diary data collection efforts of note during the pandemic outside the UK have taken place in Austria [12], Turkey [13], and a small non-representative (online self-selected) sample in Belgium [14].…”