Baby steps: the gender division of childcare during the COVID-19 pandemic

By Almudena Sevilla, Sarah Smith. Oxford review of economic policy, 2020

436 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract The nature and scale of the shocks to the demand for, and the supply of, home childcare during the COVID-19 pandemic provide a unique opportunity to increase our understanding of the division of home labour and the determinants of specialization within the household. We collected real-time data on daily lives to document the impact of measures to control COVID-19 on UK families with children under the age of 12. We document that these families have been doing the equivalent of a working week in childcare, with mothers bearing most of the burden. The additional hours of childcare done by women are less sensitive to their employment than they are for men, leaving many women juggling work and (a lot more) childcare, with likely adverse effects on their mental health and future careers. However, some households, those in which men have not been working, have taken greater steps towards an equal allocation, offering the prospect of sharing the burden of childcare more equally in the future.

Subfields: Gender Studies, General Health Professions, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/234a3da88e69a14afb9d30f5db31cce0e8ea9b1d

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Citations in the corpus

Gender inequality in COVID-19 times: evidence from UK prolific participants (2020, background): “…between 3.4 and 3.9 h, and housework, between 2.3 and 2.8 h, consistent with previous research [Andrew et al. (2020), Hupkau and Petrongolo (2020), Sevilla and Smith (2020)].3 1The deterioration in women’s mental health relative to men’s mental health was of the size of the pre-COVID-19 mental…”
From Mancession to Shecession: Women’s Employment in Regular and Pandemic Recessions (2021, background): “Hupkau and Petrongolo (2020) and Sevilla and Smith (2020) both document a decline in the gender childcare gap during the pandemic, especially when men can work from home or lost their jobs.”
Women’s and men’s work, housework and childcare, before and during COVID-19 (2020, background): “Preliminary evidence from Spain (Farré et al. 2020) and from the UK (Sevilla and Smith 2020) 1 For further details see: http://www.protezionecivile.gov.it/documents/20182/1227694/Summary+of +measures+taken+against+the+spread+of+C-19/c16459ad-4e52-4e90-90f3-c6a2b30c17eb shows that there has been a…”
This Time It's Different: The Role of Women's Employment in a Pandemic Recession (2020, result): “Similar observations have been made in other countries: see von Gaudecker et al. (2020) for the Netherlands, Möhring et al.”
The impact of COVID-19 on gender inequality in the labor market and gender-role attitudes (2020, background): “Accordingly, time allocation for childcare has become more equal during COVID-19 when men are working from home or have lost their jobs (Sevilla and Smith 2020).”