Annabelle Hutchinson, Sarah Khan, and Hilary Matfess
In our new article, “Childcare, Work, and Household Labor During a Pandemic: Evidence on Parents’ Preferences in the United States,” we consider how American heterosexual families navigated the sudden collapse of childcare availability in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our findings point to the persistence of gender norms that result in women shouldering a disproportionate share of care work, even as the pandemic disrupted so much else in our lives.
As we note in the paper, to investigate this phenomenon, “we conducted a conjoint survey experiment with an online sample of nearly 2000 parents in the USA during August 2020. Respondents were shown vignettes depicting different household arrangements, asked to choose which arrangement they would personally prefer to be in and to rate the perceived fairness of each. Each vignette describes the situation of a heterosexual married couple with two children and has five randomly varied attributes: the availability of childcare, the wife’s work status and income, the husband’s work status and income, how they divide time spent on household chores, and the frequency with which the husband contributes to traditionally “feminine” chores. The conjoint design allows us to estimate how each of these features affects parents’ preferences and fairness perceptions, and how sensitive these preferences are to childcare availability.”
One of the least surprising findings was the preference for household arrangements in which outside childcare is available; more interestingly and contrary to our expectations, the unavailability of outside childcare did not change how parents weighed other aspects of household arrangements, at least in our experimental context. There was no gender gap in regarding preferences for childcare availability, despite significant evidence that this work is shouldered disproportionately by women.
Another notable finding was the ways in which the gender of the wage earner influenced the perceived value of the income; put another way, we found evidence that families value a dollar earned by a man more than a dollar earned by a woman. We found this tendency among both men and women in our survey experiment.
Our survey experiment did reveal a gendered preference regarding the distribution of household tasks. We found that, though both men and women in our sample preferred and considered more fair scenarios in which the husband and wife spend an equal amount of time on household labor and in which men contribute to traditionally feminine tasks, this preference was stronger in our female respondents.
These findings have significance for our understanding of women’s lives during and, eventually, after the COVID-19 pandemic. Importantly, our findings suggest that a ‘shock’ to childcare availability may not be sufficient to shake traditional gender norms and preferences. As we note in the article, this has significant implications for women’s participation in the labor force; if the lack of childcare does not result in a greater sensitivity to the intra-household division of labor, it could produce a situation in which “men may be taking on a greater volume of chores and care work than before, but not large enough to actually skew the division toward a more equal situation.”
As we navigate yet another year of the pandemic, seeking a ‘return to normal’ from the cataclysmic shifts wrought by COVID-19, our study suggests what we must also turn our attention to what is necessary to shift the pre-pandemic status quo with respect to gendered divisions of labor.