Women's Work, Housework and Childcare, Before and During Covid-19

By Daniela Del Boca, Noemi Oggero, P. Profeta, Mariacristina Rossi. Social Science Research Network, 2020

148 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Evidence from past economic crises indicates that recessions often affect menâ€™s and womenâ€™s employment differently, with a greater impact on male-dominated sectors. The current COVID-19 crisis presents novel characteristics that have affected economic, health and social phenomena over wide swaths of the economy. Social distancing measures to combat the spread of the virus, such as working from home and school closures, have placed an additional tremendous burden on families. Using new survey data collected in April 2020 from a representative sample of Italian women, we analyse jointly the effect of COVID-19 on the working arrangements, housework and childcare of couples where both partners work. Our results show that most of the additional workload associated to COVID-19 falls on women while childcare activities are more equally shared within the couple than housework activities. According to our empirical estimates, changes to the amount of housework done by women during the emergency do not seem to depend on their partnersâ€™ working arrangements. With the exception of those continuing to work at their usual place of work, all of the women surveyed spend more time on housework than before. In contrast, the amount of time men devote to housework does depend on their partnersâ€™ working arrangements: men whose partners continue to work at their usual workplace spend more time on housework than before. The link between time devoted to childcare and working arrangements is more symmetric, with both women and men spending less time with their children if they continue to work away from home. For home schooling, too, parents who continue to go to their usual workplace after the lockdown are less likely to spend greater amounts of time with their children than before. Similar results emerge for our sample of women not working before the emergency. Finally, analysis of work-life balance satis faction shows that working women with children aged 0-5 are those who say they find balancing work and family more difficult during COVID-19. The work-life balance is especially difficult to achieve for those with partners who continue to work outside the home during the emergency.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5787d464f991a5dbd08e1ead2f4127485151f617

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Citations in the corpus

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. (2020) for Germany, and Del Boca et al. (2020) for Italy.”
Gender inequality in COVID-19 times: evidence from UK prolific participants (2020, background): “6 Del Boca et al. (2020) find that in Italy the additional workload in the household falls on women. Similarly, Farré et al. (2020) document that most of the burden fell on women in Spain.”
The virus changed everything, didn’t it? Couples’ division of housework and childcare before and during the Corona crisis (2020, background): “Moreover, it will be important to relate findings from Germany to such from other countries, like Italy or Spain (e.g., Del Boca et al. 2020; Farré et al. 2020), which were hit even more severely by the Corona crisis and might thus also experience more severe consequences.”
Why Working from Home Will Stick (2020, background): “Other studies delve 23 into how WFH affects housing demand (Stanton and Tiwari, 2021), housing prices and rents (Ramani and Bloom, 2021), the division of labor within households (Alon et al. 2020a, and Del Boca et al. 2020), and residential electricity consumption (Cicala, 2020) – an incomplete list”