The impact of COVID-19 on the gender division of housework and childcare: Evidence from two waves of the pandemic in Italy

The COVID-19 crisis has affected the lives of millions of people around the world, with devastating consequences on economic, health, and educational outcomes. Lockdowns have forced people to adapt to new working arrangements; an increasing trend of emptying offices was observed as employees started working from home. School closures mean more time must be spent on housework, childcare, and helping students with distance learning. But how is this increased burden of work shared between men and women? Did the pandemic have any effect on the pre-COVID division of labor within the household? What role does remote work play in the reallocation of labor within the household?

Before COVID-19, on average, women in OECD countries spent 2 hours per day more than men on unpaid work at home.

In OECD countries, women spend on average 263.4 minutes per day in unpaid work and men 136.5 minutes. The difference amounts to 126.9 minutes, i.e., slightly more than 2 hours. In Italy, the gender gap is even higher, with women spending 306.3 minutes per day in unpaid activities such as routine housework, shopping, and care for household members, and men 130.7 minutes. Data come from OECD statistics, based on national time-use surveys (https://stats.oecd.org/index.aspx?queryid=54757).

A new equilibrium will emerge, depending on which of these two possible scenarios prevail. We expect the first to characterize the short-run impact of COVID-19, especially in countries with conservative gender norms and a substantial asymmetry between men and women in the household. The second scenario needs more time to materialize and is strongly linked to the working arrangements of men and women within the couple. If more men work from home, their involvement in housework and childcare could likely increase.

Prior to COVID-19, the household division of labor in Italy was already highly unbalanced (Del Boca et al., 2020). Our research shows how the situation has changed since the pandemic. Italy was the first European country to report people infected by the new Coronavirus, and one of the countries with the highest number of cases. Italy went through two main periods of restrictions starting in March 2020 and October 2020. Thus, it represents the ideal context for studying whether the division of labor within the household changed at the outbreak of the pandemic and if it has evolved over time.

We use a unique source of data to run our research. A sample representative of Italian working women was surveyed during the two periods of restriction, with the first interviews conducted in April 2020 and the second in November 2020. The subjects were asked about their own working arrangements and those of their partners, especially about whether they were working from home at the time of the survey, at their usual workplace, or currently not working. They were also asked to provide information about how much time they and their partner spent on housework, childcare, and helping their children with distance learning.

The timing of the two surveys allowed us to identify any short- and longer-run changes to working arrangements and the household division of labor as a result of the pandemic. We compared how the working arrangements of women and their partners were shaped by the pandemic during the first and second waves, and looked at how the working arrangements during the two waves affected the number of hours each partner spent on housework and childcare. We wanted to see whether the time spent on family-related responsibilities correlated to the time spent at home due to the emergency restrictions. We found that the gender gap in household care related activities increased during the first wave of COVID-19 pandemic. Although the gap was less pronounced during the second wave, the distribution of time spent on housework and childcare within the couple remained highly unbalanced against women, even after accounting for the two partners’ working arrangements. Time spent on housework, childcare, and supporting distance learning by women does not depend on their partners’ working arrangements. Conversely, men spent fewer hours helping with housework and home schooling when their partners were at home. However, even if men were working remotely from home or not at all and thus spent more hours on family work during the second wave of COVID-19, the increased time they spent at home did not seem to lead to a full reallocation of couples’ roles in housework and children care.

While past economic crises had a greater negative effect on men's than on women's employment, COVID-19 has hit women equally or even harder than men, as many of the jobs lost have been in service sectors with large female workforces, such as retail, restaurants, and hospitality (ILO, 2020; Hupkau and Petrongolo, 2020; Alon et al., 2020).

Albanesi and Kim (2021) analyzed US data before and during the pandemic and concluded that the adverse impact of the pandemic on employment, unemployment, and non-participation rates has mostly affected women, particularly mothers. In their analysis of the US case, Béland et al. (2020) and Gupta et al. (2020) show that significant short-term employment effects characterized states that implemented tighter stay-at-home orders. The length of school closures also negatively affects labor supply, especially that of mothers (Amuedo-Dorantes et al., 2020).

A comparative analysis of a novel data set including Italy, the UK, and the US confirms these results (Biroli et al., 2020). D’Ambrosio et al. (2020) collected and analyzed a new data set of 1,700 partners cohabiting during 2020

https://humanities.uni.lu/virtual-faculty/how-do-different-confinement-measures-affect-people-across-europe

In a previous paper, we have showed the differences between working arrangements and domestic activities in Italy before and during COVID-19 (Del Boca et al., 2020). In particular, we showed that most of the additional housework and childcare associated with COVID-19 in March 2020 fell on women, even though childcare activities were more equally shared within the couple than housework activities. However, first wave data alone do not allow us to identify the two possible sides of the relationship between COVID-19 and the division of labor within the household, since more time is needed to see if there is a change in family arrangements. A few months after the lockdown, the number of cases increased again and the virus spread even more widely than it did during the first wave (March–May 2020). The second wave was characterized in a very different way than the first one, since the contagion rates were much higher and the measures adopted much weaker. We then collected new data at the end of November 2020, and in this paper, we explore the different associations between working arrangements and the allocation of domestic activities in the two waves. Indeed, the timing of the two surveys allows us to identify any short- and longer-run changes to the household division of labor as a result of the pandemic. Analyzing the two waves of the pandemic, this paper is the first to explore how and to what extent family roles changed between the first and second waves of COVID-19 in Italy and thus to assess whether a new equilibrium in the intra-family division of work and family work has emerged.

The paper is organized as follows: Section 2 explains the conceptual framework, Section 3 presents our data, Section 4 presents the empirical analysis, and Section 5 concludes.

A large body of literature across family economics, demography, and other social sciences has studied the increasing role of women in the economy and society, known as the gender revolution (Goldscheider, 2000; Goldscheider et al., 2015) and the “quiet revolution” (Goldin, 2006). The division of labor within the household plays an important role in the different phases of the revolution. In the first phase, women began to pursue higher levels of education and participated increasingly in the labor market, although they continued to be responsible for housework and childcare within the family. Then, changes in the identity of women in their job and a joint decision-making process within the couple (Goldin, 2006) may imply that men are also more involved in family activities, including housework and childcare. In turn, men's involvement in the family may play a substantial positive role in supporting maternal employment (Fanelli and Profeta, 2021).

While it seems quite intuitive, attention to the role of remote working as a facilitator of equal sharing of family responsibilities within the couple is very recent. Working from home may help to rebalance the division of labor within the household (see also Schieman et al., 2009; Mas and Pallais, 2020). Angelici and Profeta (2020) show that flexible work arrangements, which allow some part of the working week to be spent at home, lead to an increase in men's contribution to housework and childcare. Pabilonia and Vernon (2021) show that working at home increases men's childcare time but not housework.

The outbreak of COVID-19 has revived attention to both the division of labor within the household and working arrangements. Recent evidence has concentrated on how the increased amount of housework, childcare, and support for distance learning caused by the pandemic was shared between men and women (see, among others, Del Boca et al., 2020; Farrè et al., 2020). In parallel, several studies have documented the spread of remote working arrangements (see for example Dey et al., 2021; Adams-Prassl et al., 2020).

Time spent at home together, due to changes in working arrangements, might play a fundamental role in the division of family tasks. On the one side, in couples where both partners work, the new working arrangement could lead to a better sharing of housework and childcare activities within the couple. On the other side, in contexts dominated by persistent stereotypes and traditional gender norms, women are likely to continue to be the main individual responsible for childcare and domestic activities. We analyze our data to understand which relationship dominates. Our empirical analysis shows that men spend less time on housework and home schooling (but the same time in childcare) when their wives are at home, no matter whether the wives work for pay or not. The time spent by women in domestic activities instead does not depend on their partners’ working arrangements. Women work more even when men work from home or do not work at all.

How do we reconcile this result with the large theoretical literature on household behavior (see Chiappori and Meghir, 2021 for a collection of contributions in this area)? In a cooperative solution in which those with higher earnings were given more of the household surplus, we would not expect to have observed such a result. Whether households behave cooperatively or noncooperatively, as shown in Del Boca and Flinn (2012), household production decisions should always be efficient. Thus, women may work more in the household independently of the employment circumstances of the husband and wife because women are more productive in housework than are men (estimates supporting this interpretation can be found in Del Boca and Flinn, 2012; Flinn et al., 2018). In a cooperative setting of the type considered by Chiappori (1997), in which household decisions are taken to be determined through the maximization of a weighted sum of the houses’ individual utilities, the results we find are consistent with husbands having a larger welfare weight than their wives, and where the welfare weights are not functions of the relative earnings contributions of the spouses.

Several studies have emphasized that working from home has also important consequences on subjective well-being (Chung, 2011; Moen et al., 2016; Angelici and Profeta, 2020). In times of uncertain economic conditions due to the pandemic, individuals’ well-being is expected to be negatively affected. This is particularly relevant for women, who on average have more unstable economic conditions and are shown to be particularly affected by the “she-cession” (Alon et al., 2020). There is no consensus on how working from home affects workers’ well-being in the literature and effects are heterogeneous. Flexibility may reduce the stress, but working from home may also create more work–family conflicts, in particular for parents who work at home during weekdays (Song and Gao, 2020).

The descriptive evidence of Table 2 suggests a link between working arrangement and the allocation of housework and childcare within the couple. To better explore this link, we now estimate a set of multivariate regressions using ordinary least squares. In Tables 3–5, we show for both working women and their partners, the association between working arrangements, together with individual and family characteristics, and the hours devoted to housework, childcare, and distance learning by women and their partners during the two waves of the pandemic (lockdown and second wave of COVID-19).

The first and third columns of Table 3 show that during both waves of the pandemic, the time spent by women on housework was not related to their home-working arrangement or to the working arrangements of their partners. During the lockdown, women who stopped working spent more hours on housework.

Non-working women spent more hours on housework compared to both women working at their usual workplace and women working from home. Regression results where the baseline category for working arrangements is “working from home” are available upon request.

The results regarding time devoted to childcare, reported in Table 4, are more similar between partners over the longer run, and show a symmetric effect on children's care when one of the partners is absent from home (columns 3 and 4). During both waves, mothers spent more hours with their children if they were not working and, in the second wave, if they were working from home. During the second wave, fathers spent more hours with their children if they were not working or worked from home. During the second wave, working-from-home mothers devoted an additional 1.4 hours to the care of children than mothers not at home and working-from-home fathers devoted an additional 1.2 hours to the care of children than fathers not at home. Also, nonworking mothers spent an additional 3.1 hours on childcare than women who continued working at their workplace, while non-working fathers spent an additional 1.6 hours on childcare compared to men who kept working at their workplace. Having children aged 0–5 years increased the time devoted to childcare especially for women.

Table 5 shows that when we consider the time spent with children in distance learning, the working arrangements either of the partner or of the woman do not affect the woman's decision of how many hours to devote to her children, even though more hours of paid work decreased the time spent on distance learning during the second wave of COVID-19. In contrast, when looking at the portion of childcare specifically devoted to home schooling, we notice that men working from home during the lockdown or not working many months after the COVID-19 outbreak contributed about half an hour more to distance learning. Finally, children aged 6–10 years were particularly demanding in terms of time spent on online schooling.

To conclude, we find that working-from-home and nonworking men spend more hours on family work than men working at the usual workplace. However, this increase of men's involvement does not seem to lead to a reallocation of couples’ roles in housework chores and childcare. The time spent on housework, childcare, and helping children in online schooling by women does not depend on their partners’ working arrangements. Conversely, men spend less time on housework and home schooling when their spouses are at home. Hence, the extra family work due to COVID-19 is a burden mainly borne by women, regardless of the time men spend at home.

Finally, in Table 6, we analyze the determinants of the difference in the daily hours devoted to housework, childcare, and children's distance learning many months after the outbreak of COVID-19. Such a gap is much higher when the woman is working from home and/or not working. The gender gap in both housework and childcare is instead lower when the partner does not work.

In many countries, the Coronavirus pandemic has been associated with a “she-cession,” since many women lost their jobs and have experienced an increase in family work. The pandemic has also imposed new working arrangements, namely working from home, which have the potential of increasing men's involvement in the family and thus of rebalancing the asymmetry in the division of housework and childcare within the couple. To what extent new work arrangements are able to achieve the goal of a more symmetric equilibrium is an empirical issue, which we have investigated using new data from Italy, a country characterized by high gender conservativeness. We have shown that, so far, working from home has not been able to rebalance the asymmetric equilibrium within the couple: although both men and women working from home are more involved in all family tasks, the time women spend on housework, childcare, and home schooling does not depend on their partners’ working arrangements. Conversely, men devote fewer hours to housework and home schooling when their spouses are at home.

Overall, our results show that COVID-19 may have a long-lasting impact on women. Policy interventions to sustain women's status during the pandemic and their future outcomes are needed. One of the most important policies discussed in the public debate in Italy [proposed in the Piano Nazionale di Ripresa e Resilienza (PNRR)] in order to reduce the gender gap in Italy has been focused on increasing the supply of childcare for children aged 0–3 years (which is lower in Italy than in the rest of Europe: 25% against 59% in France, 42% in Spain, and 35% in Germany, for example).

Brilli et al. (2016) have analyzed the significant impact of childcare availability in Italy for mothers’ participation and child outcomes.

As research carried out in other European countries that experimented longer paternity leaves has shown, the introduction of such a policy has induced a shift toward a more egalitarian family model (Farré et al., 2022; Dunatchik and Özcan, 2021). The implementations of longer mandatory paternity leave (now in Italy 10 days) could potentially contribute to rebalancing women's workload (at home and in the market), and would possibly shift Italian gender norms from the traditional family structure to a more egalitarian role model.