COVID‐19 and the gender gap in work hours

By Caitlyn Collins, Liana Christin Landivar, Leah Ruppanner, William J. Scarborough. Gender, Work & Organization, 2020

1,005 citations recorded by the source corpus.

School and day care closures due to the COVID‐19 pandemic have increased caregiving responsibilities for working parents. As a result, many have changed their work hours to meet these growing demands. In this study, we use panel data from the US Current Population Survey to examine changes in mothers’ and fathers’ work hours from February through April 2020, the period of time prior to the widespread COVID‐19 outbreak in the United States and through its first peak. Using person‐level fixed effects models, we find that mothers with young children have reduced their work hours four to five times more than fathers. Consequently, the gender gap in work hours has grown by 20–50 per cent. These findings indicate yet another negative consequence of the COVID‐19 pandemic, highlighting the challenges it poses to women’s work hours and employment.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f1210adb29dc29e42e5131eda6f89d31f196f068

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Gender Studies

In General Health Professions

In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

Women, Gender equality and COVID-19 (2020, background): “Even in homes where both parents have been telecommuting during the pandemic, it is mothers more than fathers who have reduced their work hours to accommodate increased childcare demands, increasing the gender gap in paid work hours (Collins et al., 2020; Lyttelton et al., 2020).”
Learning loss due to school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic (2021, neutral): “Test scores do not consider children’s psychosocial development (63, 64), either societal costs due to productivity decline or heightened pressure among parents (65, 66).”
This Time It's Different: The Role of Women's Employment in a Pandemic Recession (2020, background): “Similarly, Collins et al. (2020) examine changes in work hours from February to April 2020 in the CPS data, and find that mothers with young children reduced their labor supply by four to five times as much as fathers.”
The COVID-19 pandemic and subjective well-being: longitudinal evidence on satisfaction with work and family (2020, background): “Several studies show that mothers bear the main burden of care work before and during the COVID-19 lockdown (Collins et al. 2020; Huebener et al. 2020; Yerkes et al. 2020).”
From Mancession to Shecession: Women’s Employment in Regular and Pandemic Recessions (2021, background): “…support our findings of large gender gaps in employment and hours reductions in response to the pandemic, especially for those with children (Collins et al. 2020; Couch, Fairlie, and Xu 2020; Cowan 2020; Dias, Chance, and Buchanan 2020;Montenovo et al. 2020; Fabrizio, Gomes, andTavares…”
The impact of COVID-19 on gender inequality in the labor market and gender-role attitudes (2020, methodology): “In the U.S., for example, since the beginning of the pandemic, mothers have reduced their working hours more than fathers (Collins et al. 2020), reinforcing and further skewing the existing distribution of childcare duties in most families.”