Paternal Part‐Time Employment and Fathers' Long‐Term Involvement in Child Care and Housework

Abstract

Objective This study examines whether paternal part‐time employment is related to greater involvement by fathers in child care and housework, both while fathers are working part‐time and after they return to full‐time employment. Background The study draws on four strands of theory—time availability, bargaining, gender ideology, and gender construction. It studies couples' division of labor in Germany, where policies increasingly support a dual‐earner, dual‐carer model. Method The study uses data from the German Socio‐Economic Panel from 1991 to 2015 on employed adult fathers living together with at least one child younger than age 17 and the mother. The analytic sample comprises 51,230 observations on 8,915 fathers. Fixed effects regression techniques are used to estimate the effect of (previous) part‐time employment on fathers' child‐care hours, housework hours, and share of child care and housework. Results Fathers did more child care and housework while they worked part time. Yet, most fathers reverted to previous levels of involvement after returning to full‐time work. The only exception was fathers with partners in full‐time employment, who spent more time doing child care and took on a greater share of housework after part‐time employment than before. Conclusion The findings are largely consistent with the time availability perspective, although the results for fathers with full‐time employed partners indicate that the relative resources and gender ideology perspectives have some explanatory power as well.

Suddenly a Stay-at-Home Dad? Short- and Long-Term Consequences of Fathers' Job Loss on Time Investment in the Household

“…Based on the existing literature, we expect a largely positive effect of exogenous job losses on paternal domestic involvement during periods of unemployment (Bünning, 2020;Foster and Stratton, 2018;Fauser, 2019;Voßemer and Heyne, 2019;Raley et al, 2012;Lachance-Grzela and Bouchard, 2010). By extending the work of Bünning (2020) on paternal part-time employment, we identify four potential mechanisms behind this positive association: 1) time availability and financial constraints, 2) intra-household bargaining power, 3) gender role attitudes, and 4) emotional bonding between fathers and children. We, additionally, derive very distinct hypotheses from the four different theoretical explanations for the empirical analysis, which allows us to make statements about which mechanisms might be more reasonable in the analyzed context.…”

“…In the past, the public debate and social science literature on labor force participation of mothers concentrated on external child care and left fathers as the more obvious in-house alternative aside. This has changed in recent years, as multiple European countries introduced father quotas to their parental leave schemes to encourage fathers to consider domestic work as an outside option (Elkins and Schurer, 2020;Averett et al, 2005;Tanaka and Waldfogel, 2007;Tamm, 2019;Bünning, 2020). While fathers in countries such as Germany and Norway responded to these "daddy months", the overall effect on paternal engagement beyond the short-term paternity leave take-up in general is inconclusive (see e.g.…”

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

“…There is empirical support for this perspective from different countries. For instance, reallocating housework to the unemployed spouse (Fauser 2019;Gough & Killewald 2011) or fathers with part-time employment doing more care work until they started working full-time (Bünning 2020). However, the workplace itself also matters: During the pandemic, parents who worked from home while their children were present might have invested more time caring than their peers who worked at their regular worksites.…”

The division of child care during the coronavirus crisis in Germany: How did short-time work affect fathers' engagement?

“…Since the implementation of this reform, parents have been eligible to receive 67 per cent of their previous income (65 per cent since 2011) for the first 12 months of parental leave. In addition, the so-called "daddy months" were introduced to incentivise fathers to take parental leave (Bünning 2020). Scholars have argued that these recent family policy reforms have led to a fundamental shift in Germany away from the country's conservative and familialistic heritage (Fleckenstein 2011).…”