Gender disparities in unpaid labor are most apparent when a mother is the only parent working from home, or when neither parent was able to work remotely, research finds.
The study in the journal Gender and Society investigates how shifts in work and school that arose due to the pandemic triggered changes in the division of labor in families. The researchers used data on two-parent households from a nationwide survey that took place in April 2020.
“It turns out that when the mother is working remotely and her partner isn’t, she ends up taking on a ton more responsibilities,” says Jerry Jacobs, a sociology professor at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the paper’s authors. “When a father is working remotely and his partner isn’t, somehow he doesn’t take on as much extra work. This seems to be a deeply gendered issue.”
Each month during the pandemic, hundreds of thousands of women lost their jobs or dropped out of the workforce to meet new demands at home.
Yet remote work also seemed to open the possibility of greater equity between the genders in domestic responsibility, as two parents would be at home and accessible.
To tease out the effects of a shift to remote work on domestic labor during the pandemic, Jacobs, sociology doctoral student Allison Dunatchik, and colleagues turned to data from a New York Times survey, that marketing research firm Morning Consult conducted. Of 2,200 respondents, 478 were partnered parents, and 151 were single parents.
While the gender of each survey respondent’s partner was unknown, the ..
Support the originator by clicking the read the rest link below.
