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.
Highlights
Crises and measures to cope with them exert a different impact on men and women, regardless of whether the nature of the crisis is economic (e.g. [1, 2]), environmental (e.g. [3,4,5]) or social (e.g. [6, 7])
We study the effect of working from home (WFH) during the first, strict COVID-19 lockdown in Austria on the division of unpaid work within heterosexual couple households and the working conditions of WFH
Our results can be interpreted as a change in the task specialization by gender, to some extent. We find that both parents or only the mother WFH does not alter the probability of men taking on more childcare tasks, but it does have an impact on housework
Summary
Crises and measures to cope with them exert a different impact on men and women, regardless of whether the nature of the crisis is economic (e.g. [1, 2]), environmental (e.g. [3,4,5]) or social (e.g. [6, 7]). The aforementioned empirical studies reveal that decisions on the allocation of time and money within the household are frequently made spontaneously, result from established practice, or have an outcome that conforms to social norms while support for actual and rational bargaining is limited Overall, these findings suggest that women and men take on different tasks based on prevailing gender roles and gendered attributions, and that social norms encourage women to assume the primary care-taking role and to conduct the bulk of unpaid housework. In the first weeks of the pandemic, Alon et al (2020) [47] optimistically argued that the COVID-19 crisis would result in a more equal division of unpaid work within couple households, which would reduce gender inequality on the labour market We test this assumption and examine whether WFH during the lockdown restrictions weakened or strengthened traditional gender roles as expressed in the division of housework and childcare. While the impact of WFH on the division of unpaid work was already debated and studied before the COVID-19 pandemic (see for instance [48]), these contributions struggled to identify the effect of WFH, as in the investigated settings WFH could have been both a cause and a consequence of unpaid work
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