Even before the pandemic, telecommuting had mixed results on gender equity. And mothers telecommuting during the pandemic report more stress and depression than mothers working outside the home. 

As of April/May 2020, 55 percent of currently employed parents were working from home, and many experts predict that telecommuting will become more widespread even if schools do reopen next month. Is telecommuting the new normal? And if so, what does that mean for women’s well-being at home and at work?

A unique new study, Before and During COVID-19: Telecommuting, Work-Family Conflict, and Gender Equality, released by the Council on Contemporary Families, compares parents who were telecommuting before the pandemic and after. The good news? Telecommuting fathers do a lot more childcare than other fathers – enough more to actually even out their time with moms. The bad news? They don’t increase their daily housework at all, while telecommuting women increase theirs by almost 50 minutes. The really bad news? Telecommuting during the pandemic increases mothers’ depression and anxiety significantly more than working from a separate location. One conclusion the authors draw is that women benefit from the boundaries created by work away from home.

Investigators Thomas Lyttelton (Yale Sociology, Emma Zang (Yale Sociology), and Kelly Musick (Cornell Policy Analysis and Management) examined time use data from parents who were telecommuting from before COVID-10 and after. Using data from the 2003-2018 American Time Use Survey (ATUS, N = 19,179) and the April and May 2020 COVID Impact Survey (N = 784), they found two distinct patterns of adjustment telecommuting, pre COVID-19:

Telecommuting dads closed the gender gap on childcare. Pre COVID-19, dads spent 67 more minutes caring for children on the days they worked exclusively from home. This was 47 minutes larger than the moms’ increases on work-from-home days.

For housework, the gender gap got worse. Pre COVID-19, when mothers worked from home, they increased their housework by 49 minutes, while fathers did no more housework on work-from-home days than on days they worked away from home.

Work-family spillover hits telecommuting moms hard. Aside from actual child care, telecommuting fathers, pre-COVID-19, reported that children were present while they were working for 21 minutes per day, on average, on days they worked from home. But mothers reported children present when they were working for 54 minutes per day, a gender gap of 27 minutes.

And in the pandemic, telecommuting moms report especially elevated stress. Telecommuting moms are more depressed and stressed than moms who work outside the home — and more depressed and stressed than dads working in either location. Telecommuting dads are actually less anxious when working from home than when at a separate workplace; the opposite is true for moms.

The authors note: “The closure of schools and childcare facilities greatly increases childcare burdens on parents, with telecommuters now expected to educate their children alongside doing their day jobs, a job that has so far fallen most heavily on women…. Mothers telecommuting in April – May 2020 reported feeling anxious, depressed, and lonely at higher rates than telecommuting fathers. The same was not true for mothers in the workplace, where we found no gender differences in stress and depression.”

What are those rates of stress now? In the pandemic, 20 percent of mothers working from home report feeling depressed, while 11 percent of fathers working from home do. For anxiety, six percent of fathers working from home report it, while three times as many mothers — 18 percent — working from home report it. (See Figure 2 in the brief for additional details.)

Where does this leave us?
“Telecommuting seems to work better for gender equity when men do it rather than when women do it. As a historian, my take is that men need to be reintegrated into the household just as women have been reintegrated into the work world. Telecommuting seems to help dads pay attention to childcare requirements they can ignore when at work,” notes Stephanie Coontz, CCF Director of Research.

“By contrast, most telecommuting women find it hard to ignore the internalized pressure to take care of every pile of dirty laundry, sweep up every pile of dirt, and jump to attention every time a child wanders into the room. This is a form of work-family conflict people often ignore when they tout the advantages of working from home, and as this report shows, it’s a source of gender inequality at home and at work,” Coontz concludes.

LINKS AND ABOUT:
Brief report: https://contemporaryfamilies.org/covid-19-telecommuting-work-family-conflict-and-gender-equality/
Press release: https://contemporaryfamilies.org/covid-19-telecommuting-work-family-conflict-and-gender-equality-advisory/

Virginia Rutter is co-editor of Families as They Really Are. Follow her at @VirginiaRutter.

A fact sheet prepared for the Council on Contemporary Families 

Mentally…Dads foster their children’s development by challenging them both cognitively and physically. Dads promote children’s communication skills by asking children questions and requiring them to clarify what they are saying. Dads encourage children to take age-appropriate risks and go outside their “comfort zone,” which can help children develop confidence and reduce anxiety. But don’t leave all the consoling and calming tasks to mom, says sociologist Barbara Risman. Men who take primary or equal responsibility for childcare are just as nurturing and sensitive as women, and great models for their children.

• Things to try: Read together with young children and engage them in back-and-forth conversation using wh-questions (i.e., Who? What? When? Where? Why? How?). For older kids, form a “book club” where you both read the same book and talk about it together. When on the playground, stand back and allow children to attempt new activities on their own first, without interfering, but provide safety and encouragement from the sidelines.

Emotionally…Dads who laugh with and praise their toddlers have kids who are less distressed in frustrating situations. When children experience anger and sadness, Dads’ support helps kids learn how to manage their emotions and have better relationships with friends. And when Dads show their teens love and acceptance, their teens have more positive outlooks and greater confidence and get better grades in school.

• Things to try: When your kids are upset, validate their feelings and help them brainstorm solutions or alternatives to the source of their frustration. For example, if your child gets upset that a favorite toy broke, tell them it’s okay to be sad and help them figure out how to fix it or suggest another fun activity they could do instead. Hug your kids often, and tell your kids that you love them as much as you can!

Healthily…Dads help raise healthy children by being present at regular family meals and by encouraging healthy eating and physical activity and modeling healthy behaviors.

• Things to try: Kids are more likely to eat foods that they helped prepare, so involve your kids in making meals and snacks. Even preschoolers can help prepare food (for example, washing or mixing ingredients, brushing bread or potatoes with oil) and older kids can help with chopping and cooking. Take walks or hikes together, play tag or basketball.

Remotely…Dads don’t have to live with their children to make a difference: Non-resident fathers who are involved in child-related activities and maintain good relationships with their children have a positive influence on children’s social and academic outcomes.

• Things to try: When you can’t see your child in person, check in regularly via phone, video-chat, or texts. Ask open-ended questions that invite conversation (“What’s something that made you happy this week?”) rather than yes or no or vague questions. Some activities can be done “together” virtually, for example being on a video-chat with your child while both watching a favorite tv show.

Intergenerationally…What Dads do now not only affects their children, but their grandchildren as well. Dads who are more involved in parenting their kids raise sons who grow up to become more involved fathers and who have better quality relationships with their own children. In addition, Dads who coparent well with Moms have sons who later form supportive relationships with their own parenting partners.

Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan, Ph.D., is a Professor in the Department of Psychology, Ohio State University, schoppe-sullivan.1@osu.edu. Kari Adamsons, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor in the Department of Human Development and Family Sciences, University of Connecticut, kari.adamsons@uconn.edu.

A briefing paper prepared for the Council on Contemporary Families Defining Consent Online Symposium (.pdf).

The current #MeToo reckoning, following from the decade-long grassroots campus sexual assault movement, underscores the pervasiveness of sexual harm. As the contribution to this symposium by Armstrong at al points out, most surveys find that 20 percent of undergraduates experience sexual assault, yet such assaults remain woefully under reported. A study of 834 undergraduate women at a Midwestern university found that 234 (34 percent) had experienced sexual assault during their time on campus. Of those, only five (2 percent) filed a formal complaint leading to a disciplinary hearing.

There is no other violation on campus that causes so much trauma, but is so difficult to adjudicate. Concrete evidence is rare. Memories are often impaired by trauma or alcohol. Shame, fear and uncertainty make disclosures unlikely. Racial bias too easily creeps in. Offenders are still not held accountable. Campuses are not yet safer. The quasi-judicial systems on campuses cannot overcome these complex problems. Responding to them requires that we resist one-size-fits-all responses.

There is reason to think it is a mistake to premise our entire response to campus sexual misconduct primarily on a serial predator model. Predators exist, but many people who cause harm are not incorrigible. Some do not realize the hurt they have caused; many do not accept that they violated consent. They too easily rationalize their behavior, reinforced by a broader set of cultural norms that objectify women, trivialize sexual encounters, and indulge drunken hook-ups. By understanding the real-life contexts of assault, we can generate better methods for processing the wide range of cases that occur.

The majority of campus assaults happen behind closed doors and often begin with some level of mutual sexual consent. Consent to kissing does not mean consent to sexual intercourse. But administrators who adjudicate sexual assault complaints must sort through conflicting stories told by people with impaired memories, typically without corroborating physical evidence, and come to a finding that has significant consequences for both parties. Even those deeply committed to reducing sexual violence face a daunting administrative task.

Many incidents of misconduct are perpetrated by one friend or acquaintance upon another; frequently by people who are too drunk to think and communicate clearly; sometimes by people with little sexual experience and much sexual anxiety; sometimes after undue badgering by peers who prioritize sexual quantification over healthy relationships. And such people are swimming in a sea of sexist and sexually-objectifying pornography and other media that reinforce toxic masculinity, perpetuate rape myths like “no means yes,” and highlight stories of high-ranking officials (like presidents and Supreme Court justices) who glibly dismiss accusations of causing serious sexual harm. The problem is too large to suspend our way out of it, although we try.

A recent history of seeking to address campus sexual assault

For nearly a decade, campus administrators have responded to the grassroots student movement and to federal oversight, both demanding greater attention to campus sexual violence. Campuses have revised their policies and procedures to make it easier for students to report assaults and file complaints. Some have walked to the edge of due process in an attempt to make it easier for accusers to be heard. Yet sexual violence continues to remain highly underreported. Few survivors avail themselves of these new, legalistic hearing processes. And when they do, many remain dissatisfied with the outcome.

Evolving Responses

The student movement that raised awareness about campus sexual assault a decade ago initially demanded that university administrators take the problem seriously and punish students with suspension and expulsion. But this movement has evolved. As an alternative to punishment in some cases, many survivors are now asking for a process that provides accountability through acknowledgment of harm and pathways to prevention. Often, they want their stories believed, for the student to apologize for the transgression, and to be reassured that the behavior will not be repeated.

Leading student sexual assault activists such as Sofie Karasek, an assault survivor herself, call for new approaches: “We need institutional responses to sexual harm that prioritize both justice and healing, not one at the expense of the other.” At Princeton University, student activists recently issued a set of 11 demands. Number three on their list: “The establishment of an opt-in restorative justice track for survivors who wish to avoid the process of Title IX proceedings.”

Is it possible to create conditions where a student who has caused sexual harm can admit fault and take responsibility for it? In a world that simultaneously celebrates sexual conquest and vilifies sex offenders, how can someone be held accountable for crossing an unacceptable line without paying a permanent price in social exclusion? Is there an alternative to our current adversarial model, which drives a permanent wedge between victim and offender and nearly forces accused students into an entrenched position of defensive denial?

Restorative justice alternative

A restorative justice (RJ) approach to campus sexual harm is a radical alternative to current systems. It is premised on the optimistic possibility that many people who might cause harm can learn to be better sexual partners, to authentically and transparently communicate during sex, and to attend to nonverbal cues that indicate (or fail to indicate) consent. It is also premised on the notion that people who cause harm can regret it and can want to do something to take responsibility and regain others’ trust in them—something restorative theorists call “earned redemption.”

Two principles are fundamental to a restorative approach. (1) It is a voluntary option reserved only for victims and accused students who agree to engage in it; RJ does not replace current systems. (2) The starting place for an RJ process is the accused student’s admission of causing harm; it is not an adversarial process subjecting the survivor to an argument about facts. The purpose is straightforward: it is a process designed to identify harms, needs, and obligations to try to make a terrible situation better. Although restorative justice is often equated with a facilitated dialogue between victim and offender, it is better understood as a philosophical approach focused on identifying and repairing harm. The approach has a clear intention, but not a fixed practice. Face-to-face dialogue is not required and many survivors would not choose it. Nevertheless, they may still wish to communicate their needs and have the person who caused harm acknowledge their wrongdoing and do something to help right the wrong.

A whole campus model of restorative justice includes three layers of action. The foundation is skill-building for interpersonal competence. Community-building circles are structured but intimate dialogues about topics of consequence, such as the nature of consent, hook-up culture, toxic masculinity, or the close association of drinking and sexual violence. In these dialogues, students do not simply get told the rules, but share with each other their honest concerns and set clear normative standards for their micro-communities, such as a first-year seminar, residence hall floor, or athletic team. This foundational layer is grounded in a public health model of primary prevention.

A second layer includes restorative responses to incidents of sexual misconduct and harm. Students may choose to participate in a restorative process as an alternative to a formal hearing, or more likely, as an alternative to doing nothing at all. The goals are accountability, student learning and development, safety planning, and personal healing. Such responses are not limited to the key stakeholders, since the fallout from such incidents of harm often extends into their larger peer groups. And they are not limited to interpersonal harms, but may include restorative responses to sexist misconduct such as “rape chants” and offensive social media posts that have a deleterious effect on campus climate.

A third layer of restorative response attends to the messy process of reintegration after a student has been found in violation of a campus sexual misconduct policy and suspended for it. The suspension itself may satisfy retributive demands but it rarely provides reassurance to the survivor or broader campus community that the student has learned anything from the sanction and will be responsible moving forward. Circles of Support and Accountability (CoSA) are a restorative model based on a highly successful model for managing sex offender reentry from prison. Campus CoSAs are groups of trained volunteers that meet with the returning students, often on a regular basis, to simultaneously provide them with social support to help them successfully graduate and to monitor them and address any early red flags to reduce risk of reoffending.

Powerful objections

There are some powerful objections to the idea of restorative justice. It may not send the message of moral outrage as clearly as retributive justice. It may put survivors in a situation that re-traumatizes them. It may be used by administrators to avoid costly hearings or litigation or bad press. RJ facilitators may be poorly trained or incompetent. These are risks. Rigorous research is needed to assess how serious they are and how effective a restorative approach can be. Nevertheless, the current models seem to be failing many students and restorative justice approaches offer one promising alternative.

The symposium editors sought to clarify a few particulars.

Q: You say that restorative justice doesn’t replace current systems. But it seems that a guy would be very reluctant to participate in a dialogue that involves acknowledging accountability if there was a chance that his confession could be used against him if the woman later files charges. Any provisions to protect him from that?

Yes, this is a significant hurdle. I’m working on a law review article right now that will include a template MOU (Memorandum of Understanding) as an agreement between the campus and the local District Attorney to provide some reassurance for a “reverse Miranda rule”–what’s said in the RJ process won’t be used against them later. Better solutions will require state legislation to protect the confidentiality of the process. In addition, campuses are having students sign confidentiality agreements and/or agree that if they choose the RJ process they would be unable to pursue a hearing later. Finally, according to Coker, some programs are asking students to formally “admit to causing harm,” but not necessarily admit to a conduct or Title IX violation.

Q: Also, you talk about a third layer after a student has been found in violation and suspended. But the first two layers don’t involve such formal punishments. What is the relationship between having this dialogue and then getting suspended, or getting suspended and then having this dialogue? 

It’s an awkward relationship. Reintegration circles are designed to follow from formal processes, not RJ processes. They are meant to address the problem of victim/community anxiety or anger about the return of a student after suspension. I published an article recently that was a case study of one such process. In that case, supporters of the offender were quite angry about how the formal process was handled, alleging racial bias, and a lot of the circle was dedicated to addressing that concern. The circle was also focused on developing plans to manage the student’s mental health and address his wish to study abroad. Of course, reentry circles would also be valuable for social support after an RJ process in which the participants voluntarily decide it is best for the student to take a leave of absence. That’s not a suspension, merely an agreement that the leave is the best way forward.

David R. Karp, PhD, is a Professor of Leadership at the University of San Diego, dkarp@sandiego.edu.

Each year, U.S. child protection authorities, tasked with responding to child abuse and neglect, investigate the families of over three million children, disproportionately poor, Black, and Native American children. A staggering one in three children can expect a CPS investigation at some point during childhood. In a new study, sociologist Kelley Fong finds that professionals frequently refer families to Child Protective Services to get them help. But because CPS is a coercive institution, not a social service one, this often undermines families in marginalized communities.  

Despite its goal of protecting children, Child Protective Services (CPS) has some troubling features in common with policing in the United States. That’s the conclusion of “The Tool We Have”: Why Child Protective Services Investigates So Many Families and How Even Good Intentions Backfire, released by the Council on Contemporary Families. Kelley Fong, an assistant professor in Georgia Tech’s School of History and Sociology, explains “how, with the fraying of the social safety net in recent decades, efforts to help families take the form of summoning an agency that can forcibly separate them.”  Dr. Fong notes, “As with the police, this expansive reliance on authorities with coercive power fosters fear and mistrust” — even when CPS finds parents are not maltreating.

The data: Interviews with people who refer families to the CPS, CPS investigators, and the moms who were investigated. To understand why CPS encounters are so commonplace, especially for marginalized families, Dr. Fong observed CPS investigations in Connecticut and interviewed approximately 100 key participants on these cases: professionals reporting suspected child maltreatment or neglect, frontline investigators, and investigated mothers. Many reporting professionals understand that CPS may not be appropriate but feel it is the only “tool we have.” As a result, referring to CPS —like calling the police — becomes a kind of catch-all reaction to non-criminal problems, in this case to get support services for families in need:

Reporting professionals almost always want CPS to provide supportive services, reasoning that CPS has more information about available and appropriate services. But CPS investigators, like reporting professionals, are often unable to address families’ persistent needs, and the fact that they come in with the power to remove children puts marginalized families in a legal but also a psychological vise.

Embracing CPS reporting as a means of rehabilitating families disproportionately exposes marginalized families to CPS’s coercive authority, and, paradoxically, that leads to less help and more mistrust.

Moms: “I was so scared.” Fong’s interviews with investigated mothers reveal the heart of the drama that can unfold with CPS.

CPS investigations foster substantial anxiety among investigated families. In these investigations the threat of removal is ever-present–even if unstated. “I couldn’t speak. The only thing that crossed my mind was that they were going to take them away,” recalled one mother. “I always thought that their job is to come in and take a child from their family,” another reflected. “Oh my God. You don’t understand. I was so scared.”

CPS reports can also lead parents to distance themselves from reporting systems. One mother, reported to CPS for using marijuana during pregnancy, hesitated to speak openly with healthcare providers afterwards. After giving birth, she worried she was experiencing postpartum depression. But, she explained, “I don’t tell them any of that because I don’t need them to say, oh, she’s going through postpartum. She’s gonna hurt the baby.”

Where this leads: “In asking CPS—like the police, armed with tools of surveillance and coercion—to take on all manner of social problems, we further traumatize and marginalize families,” Fong explains. She argues that changes in training and development of support-oriented crisis response teams would be better aligned with many of the family needs that are often handed off to CPS.

When you see the fist, you panic. Stephanie Coontz, CCF’s Director of Research, observes: “Fong’s CPS findings parallel what happens when we ask police to respond to problems that social workers should be dealing with. In both cases, people who’ve been trained to coerce and punish bad actors are asked to get needy people out of bad situations.  We tell people wearing a gauntleted fist to extend a helping hand. They aren’t trained to do that, and even when they try, many people only see the fist and they panic.”

FOR MORE INFORMATION, PLEASE CONTACT:
Kelley Fong, Assistant Professor, School of History and Sociology, Georgia Institute of Technology; ktfong@gatech.edu.

LINKS AND ABOUT:
Brief report: https://contemporaryfamilies.org/cps-brief-report/
Press release: https://contemporaryfamilies.org/cps-release/
Preprint of underlying new study: https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/kfong/files/fong_asr.pdf

Virginia Rutter is co-editor of Families as They Really Are. Follow her at @VirginiaRutter.

In the first installment of our “pandemic home tour,” I began by noting what has been happening in contemporary families, citing findings described in my 2017 book The Stuff of Family Life and then contrasting them with pandemic-related patterns. I discussed the sleeping spaces of children and young adults as locations for identity transitions when they move from childhood bedroom to dorm room or apartment (now thwarted by pandemic pushes for young adults to remain home while starting or continuing an adult chapter of life). I named adults’ bedrooms as locations for the placement and sometimes accidental display of intimate objects (now turned into both rest and paid work spaces with technological devices that simultaneously give outsiders glimpses into our private worlds and connect us to intimate others via video calls). In this portion of our home tour, we head into kitchens, hobby areas, dining rooms, patios, and beyond to uncover the ways that inequalities and ideologies about families and homes are shifting during the pandemic.

It has long been the case that kitchens and hobby areas (such as tool sheds or craft rooms or, in my house, the dining room table) are labor-rich spaces in the home, both for everyday household labor such as cooking and washing dishes, and for activities more likely today (especially among middle class families) to be labeled as leisure such as sewing, woodworking, baking, or home décor projects. And while men and women are looking more similar to each other than in the past with regard to home-based labor and leisure, it is still the case that women bear the brunt of domestic responsibilities, including those that are about the aesthetic representation of the home via pandemic-inspired “statement” décor and the provision of carb-loaded comfort via sourdough starters.

Now in the kitchen we see a move toward more home-cooking as restaurants have had to close or limit their capacities. Over the last several months in hobby areas (or on dining room tables) we have seen an increase in home remodeling projects, Marie Kondo-ing, and crafting (including fabric mask-making) as people renew their interests in domestic hobbies and notice the spaces that need fixing up or cleaning up more than before. In other words, in light of lessened travel and more time spent at home, we are seeing more attention to domestic display and more at-home leisure, especially among those who can afford the time and money needed to decorate, bake, or sew for fun.

The move to more at-home cooking, eating, and hobby-making is one that is experienced by men and women differently in even more pronounced ways during the pandemic. Inequalities between men and women have been exacerbated in the management of home and work responsibilities such as homeschooling and cleaning (and in the disproportionate reduction of work productivity among women). Who has time for hobbies when paid work and homeschooling children co-occur? Whether it is helping a child with homework, setting up a home office at the kitchen table next to groceries, or pulling out the power tools to fix that door that has been squeaking since pre-COVID days, the labor associated with increased time spent at home is not equitably distributed and seems to be reverting to more traditional gender roles than we’ve seen in some time.

The living room (or family room), a more public space within a home as compared to a bedroom or bathroom, has long been a place where parents, children, and guests interact and sometimes compete over its use. It is also seen as a place of relaxation and socializing, with TVs and low tables and couches meant more for plopping and chatting than for sitting up straight. During the pandemic, when the invitation of outsiders into a home carries with it a whole new set of safety-related meanings, and when there are more people spending more time at home (thus competing over space), spaces just outside of homes have been turned into spots for “living room-type” interactions. Patios, porches, balconies, and rooftops are the new second living rooms – the social hour locations and retreats from the “bustle” of home. It is no wonder that sales of outdoor couches have skyrocketed (it is also no wonder that the patio heater I ordered online seems to have doubled in price between August and September).

Any decent family scholar will tell you that a home tour should never start or end at the doors of a single home. There are countless spaces beyond a single home that are part of contemporary family stories, before and during the pandemic. For example, what about those families who spend time in two or more home spaces – divorced or separated families, created families, transnational families, and intergenerational families who do not limit their frequent connectedness to one dwelling? In my 2017 book, I wrote that it is a mistake to presume a home has clear boundaries and is limited only to those whose private lives are connected. In fact, to do so lessens our ability to understand families as they really are, including inequalities and problems that are hard to eradicate because they are too-often hidden behind closed doors.

During the pandemic, we have seen kids navigate different quarantine rules and space allocations in the households of separated parents. We have seen the creation of “pandemic pods” to allow for at least some enhanced social interaction among those who may not share a dwelling but who would call each other brother and sister. We have seen political moves that render national borders impermeable between countries for people who are just trying to return to their families. We have seen people unable to visit aging parents or grandparents in their homes, in senior living homes, and even in hospitals. In all of these cases, we are realizing perhaps more than before that we don’t always get to control the boundaries in our family lives, and that, when we do feel a little bit of control, we create connections rather than barriers.

We spend a lot of time in our families working on defining and dealing with boundaries. Who counts as family? When will I be an adult? Who is entitled to work spaces in a home with doors that close? Can I wear pajama pants during my work call? Which spaces are off limits to kids and visitors? The pandemic not only shines a spotlight on these boundary-making processes that we were already doing, it disrupts them. Let’s pay attention so that we can more fully and intentionally use our home spaces to see connections between us and others, and to be aware of the significance of space and objects in our relationships.

Defining family life as an entirely private affair fails to account for how our family lives actually are. We constantly interweave public and private life, and not just by opening fence gates and creating desire lines across our lawns or apartment building carpets that emerge from countless visits with neighbors. What happens in the world is happening in our homes. Our private stories are curated in public social media outlets. And during a pandemic, our private health stories are part of public health concerns. Now, while seeing grandparents through windows and putting plexiglass and cotton fabric between our faces and six feet between our bodies, we realize just how not-human those boundaries feel. We realize that rendering family life as entirely private, as entirely home-centric, also renders us home-bound and missing out on the larger social connections that sustain us as social beings.

Michelle Janning, is the Raymond and Elsie Gipson DeBurgh Chair of Social Sciences and Professor and Chair of Sociology at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington. She is the author of several books on how spaces and objects not only symbolize what’s happening in contemporary families, but also shape family life itself. She also sewed a couple hundred fabric masks this summer to give away so that she could have people visit her on her patio. Michelle’s latest article is from Bringing Children Back into the Family: Relationality, Connectedness, and Home, in the Sociological Studies of Children and Youth Series. The book is available to buy from this link – to get 30% off from any book in the series use the discount code BCBF. Janning’s work is described at www.michellejanning.com.

In my 2017 book The Stuff of Family Life I show how home spaces and objects – room by room and life stage by life stage – tell the stories of contemporary family life. In 2020, the stories have taken some pandemic-related turns, including the shift of some home spaces to new functions (for example, my dining room is also my classroom, my office, and – evidenced by the loud chewing noises near my feet during my classes – my dog’s lunchroom). In this two-part series I provide a “pandemic home tour” in which I contrast the stuff (and spaces) of pre-pandemic family life with what is happening now.

In this installment I highlight bedrooms and home offices, calling attention to identity transitions and changing ways that intimacy is (and sometimes is not meant to be) shared in our interactions with others.

I begin our home tour in a child’s bedroom. A few years ago when I surveyed college students about how they defined home, it became clear that a geographic move away from a childhood bedroom accompanies the perception that this move signifies increasing independence, where the accessories of childhood are left behind. Even if stuffed animals and childhood bedspreads find their way into residence hall rooms, students strategically curate these items for a new audience in a more public setting, all the while wrestling with the best way to materially symbolize a burgeoning adult identity. Rather than putting a teddy bear on top of a bed, a student may hide it in a drawer to keep the childhood vibe to a minimum, only pulling it out at bedtime or to show it to a few intimate friends as they talk about their childhoods.

In the time of COVID-19, many college students are either starting college in their childhood bedrooms or returning home to those spaces to continue their higher education journey once their campus closes. In fact, the proportion of all 18- to 29-year-olds who live with their parents has now surpassed 50%, which is a higher proportion than seen during the Great Depression. The process at play this fall for young adults who otherwise would live on the campus of a residential college or university or in an apartment involves a renegotiation of adult-type roles with family members who may see them as children. Alongside this role renegotiation is a material and spatial negotiation that asks whether the spaces and objects of childhood are amenable to burgeoning independence (and amenable to display to new college and job peers in Zoom classes). Preliminary evidence suggests they are not. Starting college in a bedroom with a Disney Channel poster unironically displayed on the wall during class may not be the most desirable Zoom background for college students who want to convey an adult identity.

And further, it is not just 18-year-olds navigating a new adult experiences in childhood bedrooms. COVID-19 has also sent millennials back to their parents’ homes (sometimes because they cannot afford to live on their own, sometimes because they choose to return home to have or provide social support even if they could afford to keep their own places). Role negotiations (and sometimes decisions about room décor and object display) between parents and adult children are thus trickier than even a year ago. It will be interesting to see how the pandemic may alter the definition of adulthood now that the criterion for geographic separation from parents is not necessarily possible, nor maybe even desirable, for 18- to 29-year-olds.

As our tour moves into home spaces that may offer privacy for adult members of families, such as a couple’s shared bedroom, we notice the storage and display of intimate objects such as pajamas, hygiene products, and even love letters. Intimate objects have always been great locations for examining how public and private boundaries can operate within a home. We know this because a request to see someone’s sock or underwear drawer would be met with furrowed eyebrows more than a request to see inside someone’s new barbeque.

In our pandemic world, bedroom spaces have been infiltrated more than in the past by communication technologies such as smartphones, tablets, and laptops. Our bedrooms have, in more cases than in the past and primarily for those who are privileged to be able to work from home using computers and communication technology, become our home offices. So now not only are children and pets Zoom-bombing work meetings, the intimate bits of our shared bedrooms are more likely to be accidentally seen by work colleagues in these video meetings. We are also establishing etiquette for these kinds of encounters, suggesting that the interaction rituals associated with these new platforms and spaces are becoming routinized and filled with meaning.

At the same time work colleagues get to see our private spaces, video conversations are more likely than before to be the place to establish new intimacies (via online dating apps) and maintain existing ones (via Zoom celebrations such as weddings). So, not only is the bedroom increasingly likely to serve as an intimate space where work occurs via digital platforms; the creation and maintenance of intimate connections requires those same platforms. The home-work boundaries we may have had in place before have been punctured, revealing that the public-private distinction that may have pushed bedrooms further into the realm of “private” has blurred. We must now spend energy on transitioning between using the laptop for an online dating encounter and that same laptop for a work meeting. The laptop, meanwhile, rests on our bed.

In the second installment of our home tour next week, I’ll showcase kitchens, hobby areas, living rooms, patios, and places where home is situated in more than one place. By doing so, I will uncover the ways that gender inequalities in families are manifesting themselves during the pandemic, as well as ideological shifts related to families and homes that are emerging in response to pandemic-related physical and spatial barriers. I discuss how the pandemic is showing us how connected we’d actually like to be, within and between families.

Michelle Janning, is the Raymond and Elsie Gipson DeBurgh Chair of Social Sciences and Professor and Chair of Sociology at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington. She is the author of several books on how spaces and objects not only symbolize what’s happening in contemporary families, but also shape family life itself. She also sewed a couple hundred fabric masks this summer to give away so that she could have people visit her on her patio. Michelle’s latest article is from Bringing Children Back into the Family: Relationality, Connectedness, and Home, in the Sociological Studies of Children and Youth Series. The book is available to buy from this link – to get 30% off from any book in the series use the discount code BCBF. Janning’s work is described at www.michellejanning.com.

The puzzle. The COVID-19 crisis has resulted in an unprecedented shift to remote work, with 55 percent of currently employed parents working from home in April/May 2020. At least some of the pandemic-related shift to telecommuting is likely to persist for some time, with companies like Facebook moving to permanent remote work for many workers. What does this mean for the perennial issue of work-family conflict, and additionally, what are the implications of expanded telecommuting arrangements for gender equality at work and in the households of parents with children?

On the one hand, telecommuting can ease work-family conflict by giving workers greater control over their schedules. Mothers of young children particularly value telecommuting, and flexible work has been linked to higher rates of maternal employment. Although mothers still do a great deal more housework and childcare than fathers, the amount of childcare done by fathers has increased almost threefold since the 1970s, and in 2019 fathers, on average, spent 55 minutes per day caring for children. Fathers also report that they would like to be spending more time with their children, so working from home could be a way for fathers to increase their share of housework and childcare. For many working couples, then, telecommuting may be an attractive and egalitarian strategy for managing the competing demands of work and family.

On the other hand, telecommuting can worsen rather than ameliorate gender inequalities in the home and in the labor market. Workplaces provide a barrier, both physical and psychological, between parents and demands to do additional childcare and housework. Social pressures to spend intensive time on child-rearing and on housework are much stronger for mothers than fathers, and once the separation from home life provided by workplaces is removed, this may lead mothers to increase the amount of household labor they do by more than fathers.

Early indications of the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on gender inequality have been contradictory, with different surveys suggesting that gender gaps in household labor have either narrowed or widened, depending on whether the researchers focused on housework and childcare alone or included home schooling.

The data. We examine the links between telecommuting and gender inequality with data collected before and during the COVID-19 crisis: the 2003-2018 American Time Use Survey (ATUS, N = 19,179) and the April and May 2020 COVID Impact Survey (N= 784). This allows us to report on gender differences in parents’ household labor and work contexts for parents working in the workplace, at home, and splitting their time between the two before the pandemic, as well as to assess the impact of telecommuting that was a direct response to the pandemic and has been taking place in the context of schools and child-care centers being shut down. We also use a subsample of regular telecommuters in ATUS (N = 339) to compare the behavior of mothers and fathers on days in the workplace and days working from home. The parents in this sample tend to be more similar in their work-related characteristics relative to a broader group that includes those who never work from home.

The results for pre-COVID-19 childcare: Telecommuting dads catch up with moms. In general, telecommuting parents put more time into household labor than do parents who work at a separate location. But prior to COVID-19, we found an interesting gender difference in what types of household labor individuals did more of when working from home, and this produced two diverging patterns in the division of total household labor. Under ordinary circumstances, telecommuting fathers increase the amount of childcare they do more than do telecommuting mothers. Looking at a subsample of mothers and fathers who all reported telecommuting some days for their job, we find that dads spent 67 more minutes caring for children on the days they worked exclusively from home than on the days they worked exclusively from the workplace. This increase in childcare time was 47 minutes larger than the average increase in childcare we find on days when mothers worked from home, and it appears to effectively close the gender gap in childcare hours (see Figure 1). By contrast, gender gaps in childcare were substantial for workers who mix their time at home and the office or who work only from the office. These results suggest that telecommuting can bring fathers closer to parity with mothers when it comes to childcare.

The results for pre-COVID-19 housework: Telecommuting moms, but not dads, do more. But for housework the opposite is true. Comparing mothers and fathers in the same sample as above, we find that on the days mothers worked from home, they increased their housework by 49 minutes. Fathers did no more housework on days when they worked from home than on days when they were absent from home while working. So when it comes to the division of housework, unlike the division of childcare, telecommuting may be associated with increased gender inequality.

The results for pre-COVID-19 work-family conflict: Children spend more than twice as much time in the presence of telecommuting moms when the moms are working than they do with dads. The issue is further complicated by the fact that people who work at home are sometimes in the presence of children even when they are not doing childcare but are working – or trying to work. This creates spillovers from the parental role into the employee role. When people are forced to juggle their attention between children and work, they experience a form of work-family conflict that is absent in work settings separate from the home – one that leaves parents unable to give either work or home life their full attention. This conflict is far more intense for telecommuting women than for their male counterparts.

In general, parents working from home report that their children are with them while they work far more than do parents in the workplace. But while telecommuting fathers reported children as present during work for 21 minutes per day, on average, on days they worked from home, mothers reported children present during work for 54 minutes per day, leaving a gender gap of 27 minutes (Figure 1). That this kind of work-family conflict disproportionately affects mothers may have downstream consequences for labor market gender inequalities, as the quality or productivity of working time may be lower for telecommuting mothers than fathers.

Why do moms do more? Our research doesn’t tell us why, exactly, telecommuting mothers do so much more housework. But we know that women often hold much stricter standards than men about the amount of laundering and daily cleaning that has to be done. While these may be “choices” made by the mother or the couple, they are often choices constrained by the tremendous pressures that women – especially married women – feel to “keep up appearances” in the home. Women also tend to feel much more pressure than men to live up to the ideals of intensive parenting. Whatever the reasons that telecommuting mothers spent more time on housework and were more likely to be interrupted by children while trying to work, the consequences seemed to counteract many of the advantages of telecommuting. Comparing the wellbeing of mothers working from home and a separate workplace before COVID-19, we find little evidence that telecommuting resolved work-family conflict: Telecommuting mothers were no happier, and no less stressed or tired, than mothers working from a workplace.

Implications? Assessing the implications of telecommuting for gender equality is especially complicated in the United States, where government support for working families is far less generous than that provided by other rich countries. Most localities do not provide free or subsidized childcare, and its unsubsidized cost is prohibitive for many families. In this context, telecommuting is a choice many parents make to solve a childcare problem. It may be the best choice in the circumstance, but it should be no surprise that making such a choice involves work-related tradeoffs, and that, given parenting norms, these tradeoffs are more severe for women. As an example, using a simple approach that assigns median earnings to average changes in work hours associated with housework, we estimate that the potential annual earnings mothers lose by devoting extra time to housework instead of wage-work is $660 for mothers who telecommute one day a week, and $2638 for mothers who telecommute four days a week.

These patterns suggest that even under circumstances where telecommuting is not a substitute for childcare or full-time school, it poses some threats to the long-term progress of gender equality, at least when engaged in by women. Given the intense socialization of women into not being able to ignore perceived demands of children and dust bunnies alike — and the outright shaming they often experience when they do ignore them — there may be some benefits to working outside the home for women. By contrast, given their socialization to be able to ignore the demands of children, there may be some benefits to working inside the home for men.

The results on working at home during the pandemic. The conditions of telecommuting imposed by COVID-19 are especially likely to increase gender inequalities in household labor and the labor market. The closure of schools and childcare facilities greatly increases childcare burdens on parents, with telecommuters now expected to educate their children alongside doing their day jobs, a job that has so far fallen most heavily on women. Overall, parents in the workplace report less depression than telecommuting parents. But the extra stress for telecommuting women is striking. Mothers telecommuting during April – May 2020 reported feeling anxious, depressed, and lonely at significantly higher rates than telecommuting fathers, who unlike actually mothers experienced less anxiety when working from home. For parents in the workplace, we found no statistically significant gender differences in rates of stress and depression (see Figure 2).

Implications, taking COVID-19 into account. Our findings on telecommuting both before and during the pandemic point to families’ –and society’s– urgent need for more government support for parents. Telecommuting has real benefits. It gives parents greater flexibility to structure their work, saves time commuting, and allows parents to spend more time with their children. And given COVID-19, telecommuting is surely the best option for parents at the moment. But when parents have to combine working from home with looking after children, it is easy for telecommuting to exacerbate gender inequalities in both formal and informal work. Even with fathers doing more, telecommuting with children detracts from mothers’ work environments and is associated with more stress. Subsidizing childcare, and, where possible, reopening schools in the fall would greatly reduce this tension. But until science suggests it is safe to do so, employers must be urged to rethink traditional measures of productivity and recognize the need for men as well as women to make the work adjustments they need to as they strive to cope with these unprecedented demands on their time and energy.

 —

Notes

Childcare Measures

In our paper, we construct two different measures of parents looking after children. First, we create a measure of childcare that combines basic care activities of younger children (e.g., feeding, bathing) with activities relating to education (e.g., helping with a child’s homework or attending a PTA meeting) and health (e.g., sitting with a sick child) and associated travel of all children under 18. This measure captures time spent explicitly caring for children. Second, we construct a broader measure of all time parents spend with household children when they are actually doing tasks other than childcare. This broader measure captures time during which parents may be splitting their attention between looking after children and another activity. We use this measure to analyze the presence of children while parents are working. In our full paper, we also look at gendered differences in time with children by telecommuting, and we find results that are similar to our reported estimates of childcare (see paper Table 2).

Couple-level Dynamics and Same-Sex Partners

The American Time Use Survey collects information on all members of a household, including couples, but only records time use data, including childcare and housework, for one person per household. This means that we can examine how telecommuting parents’ behaviors differ based on their partners’ employment, and we find that telecommuting fathers particularly increase the amount of childcare they do when their partners work full time (more than 35 hours per week). But we do not have information on partners’ telecommuting, and thus cannot assess how parents react to their partner’s telecommuting. The number of telecommuters in our descriptive sample (788 parents telecommuting for full days) also prevents us from examining same-sex couples. Without such narrowly prescribed gender roles to fall back on, same-sex couples divide childcare and housework tasks more fairly than opposite-sex couples, and so we would expect their reaction to telecommuting to also differ. This could be a fruitful avenue for future research.

FOR MORE INFORMATION, PLEASE CONTACT:
Thomas Lyttelton is PhD candidate in Sociology at Yale. Contact him at thomas.lyttelton@yale.edu . Emma Zang is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Yale; contact her at emma.zang@yale.edu.
Kelly Musick is Professor and Chair of Cornell Policy Analysis and Management and can be reached at musick@cornell.edu. 

LINKS AND ABOUT:
Brief report: https://contemporaryfamilies.org/covid-19-telecommuting-work-family-conflict-and-gender-equality/
Press release: https://contemporaryfamilies.org/covid-19-telecommuting-work-family-conflict-and-gender-equality-advisory/

For the past 30 years the gender revolution has proceeded at a snail’s pace. Some argue it has actually stalled. Relationship quality and stability now appear greatest when heterosexual partners are equals, and some evidence shows that couples are increasingly likely to share domestic labor. Yet the proportion of couples who achieve egalitarian arrangements remains low relative to the proportion of adults who value gender equality. And now, as the COVID-19 pandemic rages, some fear the gains of the gender revolution will be erased. Recent surveys commissioned by the New York Times and USA Today appear to confirm such fears, suggesting that during the pandemic women continue to shoulder the majority of housework and childcare, and now also do the majority of homeschooling too, despite men’s claims to the contrary.

A focus on homeschooling as an emergent and pressing issue is understandable, given the way this task may exacerbate inequalities at home. But how partners divide the responsibilities for educating their children during the pandemic may tell us little about the future of gender equality once the pandemic ends, since homeschooling is temporary for most parents. When we examine trends in the division of those housework and childcare tasks that have been in the process of renegotiation for decades, the patterns provide evidence of more egalitarian progress.

A glass half full or half empty? Most women still do more at home than men, but many men are doing more than before the pandemic — and very few (if any) are doing less

Our survey^[i], an online non-probability sample of parents (n = 1,060) in different-sex couples, conducted in mid-April, assessed divisions of labor during the pandemic and compared them to how couples divided labor before it began. Our results^[ii] suggest a more hopeful scenario than those implied by the headlines: According to both men and women, men are doing more housework and childcare during the pandemic than before it began, leading to more equal sharing of domestic labor. Moreover, given the conditions under which men are doing more, there is potential that these changes may persist after the pandemic ends.

Though homeschooling falls largely on the shoulders of women, our results indicate that for the majority of men and women (approximately 60 percent), time in domestic labor has not changed since the beginning of the pandemic, even accounting for helping children with homework. This is because time in some tasks like transporting children, attending children’s events, organizing children’s schedules/activities, and grocery shopping (for women, at least) have declined dramatically or stopped altogether.

Men and women differ in their reports of who does more domestic work; the truth is likely somewhere in the middle.

One of the most provocative findings in the NYT and USA Today surveys is the discrepancy between men’s and women’s reports of who is doing what in the household. For example, in the NYT story, 80 percent of women report doing the majority of homeschooling right now. Yet 45 percent of men also claim to be doing most of the schooling, while only three percent of women report their male partners as the primary educator. Like the Times, we find that most women (70 percent) report being primarily responsible for homeschooling during the pandemic, but we find a much smaller gender gap in men’s and women’s assessments of men’s responsibilities for schooling: 20 percent of men say they are doing the online educating while three percent of women say their male partners are largely responsible. Discrepancies between the estimates in the two studies may be the result of sampling variation or differences in question wording – the NYT asked about homeschooling children or helping with distance learning – that may influence responses.

Men and women also differ in their reports of how much housework and childcare each is doing, although the differences are not as large as over the homeschooling question. The NYT story suggests that men’s estimates are more accurate than women’s. But it is not at all clear that men exaggerate their time use more than women in surveys or fail to notice their partners’ time use more than women do (Bianchi et al. 2000; Kamo 2000; Lee and Waite 2005; Yavorksy, Kamp-Dush, and Schoppe-Sullivan 2015). In an appendix to this report, we discuss why we use both men’s and women’s reports to construct estimates of the division of domestic labor during the COVID-19 pandemic – an approach we argue is ultimately conservative. Nonetheless, even if we rely only on women’s reports, the story from our data on how the pandemic has changed domestic labor is the same: Men are doing more housework and childcare since the pandemic began, and this has led to an increase in egalitarian domestic arrangements.

When we focus on the housework and childcare tasks that couples were dividing before the pandemic, we find that among couples where the division of tasks has changed, it has changed in an egalitarian direction. Indeed, in no situation — and in no type of family, whether dual-earner where both are working full-time, dual-earner where someone is working part-time, single earner, or both unemployed — did we find that the division of tasks became less likely to be shared.

Considering both men’s and women’s reports, we see that prior to the start of the pandemic, 26 percent of parents reported sharing routine housework^[iii] relatively equally^[iv] with their partner, 41 percent reported sharing care for young children^[v] relatively equally – although physical childcare and the mental load of organizing children’s lives were by and large mother’s responsibilities — and 45 percent reported sharing care of older children^[vi]. A little more than a month after the start of the pandemic, 41 percent of parents reported sharing housework with their partners – a significant 58 percent increase — while the percentage of partnered parents reporting equal sharing care of young and older children also increased significantly, to 52 percent and 56 percent respectively. The proportion sharing in the care of young and older children grew by 27 and 24 percent respectively, driven by increases in equal sharing of physical care, monitoring, reading, and organizing children’s activities.

We find similar evidence of change when we restrict analyses to women’s reports only. Only one-in-six women (16 percent) reported sharing housework with their partners prior to the pandemic, compared with more than one-in-four (27 percent) who reported sharing it during the pandemic. As for childcare, 28 percent of women reported sharing care of young children relatively equally prior to the pandemic while 34 percent reported sharing it equally during. For older children, women’s reports of equal sharing grew from 29 percent to 42 percent.

The increase in egalitarian arrangements is largely the product of men’s doing more. Forty-two percent of fathers reported an overall increase in housework time, 45 percent reported more time in the care of young children overall, and 43 percent reported more total care of older children. Many mothers also reported that their partners increased their total time in housework (25 percent), care of young children (34 percent), and care of older children (20 percent). Nonetheless, mothers are significantly less likely than fathers to report that fathers have increased their time in housework or childcare. Men and women who report that fathers increased their time in housework and childcare also widely report that they were sharing housework (69 percent) and childcare (76 percent) responsibilities equally with their partner during the pandemic or that the men were doing the majority.

Consistent with past research (Kamo 2000; Lee and Waite 2005), though men and women disagree on men’s time, there was no such disagreement regarding mother’s time. More than one-quarter of both fathers and mothers reported an increase in mothers’ time in housework and childcare. The women most likely to increase their time in childcare and housework were the ones who were already responsible for the majority of such work before the pandemic. Parents also agree that between 11-16 percent of mothers and 6-8 percent of fathers decreased their overall time in domestic work. This might be because some tasks are just currently obsolete.

We still don’t have an egalitarian utopia

Families are sharing domestic labor more equally since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. That is not to say, however, that the pandemic has created an egalitarian utopia in households. Indeed, although conventionally gendered divisions of housework and childcare have become less common since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, many mothers continue to find themselves in these arrangements. Of the mothers who continued to be primarily responsible for domestic work during the COVID-19 pandemic, roughly one-third increased their time spent in housework and care of children during the pandemic. Moreover, 70 percent are also solely responsible for educating their children. Consequently, among families that have not moved toward more egalitarianism, domestic work for mothers has become even more time-intensive.

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted every aspect of Americans’ daily lives. Stay-at-home orders in nearly every state, along with the closure of schools, childcare centers, and non-essential businesses, have placed immense strain on families, suspending important care supports and demolishing barriers between work and family roles. Our findings demonstrate that the COVID-19 pandemic has both exacerbated and reduced gender inequalities in the division of domestic labor. For women who continued to shoulder domestic work during the pandemic, housework and childcare responsibilities have become much more arduous. Not only are these women spending more time in classic tasks, but homeschooling has also been added to their plates. Nonetheless, though roughly half of women are doing most of the housework and childcare right now, according to our estimates another half of women are not. Among a sizeable number of families, the burden of domestic responsibilities has become more equal as fathers have increased their contributions to housework and childcare.

Will the trend towards egalitarianism last beyond the crisis?

A central question is whether fathers will continue their domestic contributions once the pandemic passes. The signs, we think, are encouraging. Research shows that many couples fail to craft egalitarian divisions of household labor in part due to unsupportive workplace-family policies (Pedulla and Thébaud 2015). The COVID-19 pandemic has eliminated some of the structural barriers to sharing domestic work – particularly for men – since many adults are now working from home. The pandemic has demonstrated that many jobs can be done remotely. To the extent such arrangements increase, this may create greater egalitarianism, because recent evidence from before the pandemic shows that men who work from home share more equally in domestic labor (Carlson, Petts, and Pepin 2020). However, whether men and women will continue to have schedule flexibility or the ability to work from home as employers re-open is unknown.

Nonetheless, just the experience of having heightened responsibilities for housework and childcare during this time bodes well for men’s continued involvement in housework and childcare. As research on paternity leave demonstrates, men who take leave, especially extensive leave (e.g., two months), continue their involvement in housework and childcare over the long-term even after returning to work (Petts and Knoester 2018; Bünning 2015). The longer the pandemic lasts, the more hardships most of us will experience. But perhaps in the aftermath the patterns of domestic involvement men are establishing now will become a new normal.

FOR MORE INFORMATION, PLEASE CONTACT:

Daniel L. Carlson / Associate Professor / Department of Family and Consumer Studies / University of Utah / daniel.carlson@fcs.utah.edu.

Richard J. Petts / Professor / Department of Sociology / Ball State University / rjpetts@bsu.edu.

Joanna Pepin / Postdoctoral Fellow / Population Research Center / University of Texas – Austin / jpepin@prc.utexas.edu.

While gender inequalities between women and men who do not have children are narrowing if not disappearing, the economic gap between mothers and fathers remains large and shows little sign of closing. Quite a bit of attention has been paid in the popular and scholarly press to the “motherhood penalty,” or earnings losses associated with becoming a mother. In the US, women’s earnings drop by 30% when they become mothers.

Until recently, relatively little attention has been paid to how these motherhood penalties translate into inequalities between partners, or within couples. Most studies on the motherhood penalty compare earnings between mothers and fathers as separate groups, and less is known about the impact of the motherhood penalty at the couple level. Moving to a focus on couples is important because it highlights how couples strategize about time and money following parenthood and how gender inequalities reproduce at the couple level.

Our study uses data on heterosexual couples from the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom to study how parenthood shapes gender inequalities at the couple level. We use longitudinal data, which means that we can follow the same couples over many years. We select a group of couples who are observed making the transition to parenthood during the survey, so that we can observe couples’ earnings when they do not have a child and follow them as they become parents and up to eight years after the transition to parenthood. To measure gender inequality at the couple level we use women’s share of couple earnings (e.g., 0% indicates that the male partner is the sole earner, 50% indicates equality in earnings, and 100% indicates that the female is the sole earner). Using this measure, our study asks: how do women’s share of couple earnings change after couples transition to parenthood?

Our results show that it changes a lot.

We find that parenthood results in large and enduring increases in gender inequalities within couples in all three countries. In the US, women’s share of couple earnings drops 8 percentage points, from about 40% to 32%; this decline is larger in the United Kingdom (12 percentage points) and largest in Germany (28 percentage points). Importantly, these declines in women’s share of couple earnings are not short-lived, on the contrary, they appear to persist over time. Following couples to the end of our study period, eight years following parenthood, we continue to see evidence of post-birth earnings losses in her relative earnings. Overall, these relative losses amount to large and substantial long-term declines in women’s economic power within couples.

Because we analyze couples across countries, our study is also able to assess how different work-family policies and cultural contexts shape how gender inequalities at the couple-level evolve with parenthood.

The relatively larger decline in women’s share of couple earnings in Germany compared to the US and the UK is in line with expectations stemming from Germany’s historical (albeit evolving) policy emphasis on and public acceptance of men’s breadwinner role, including long maternity leaves and a lack of childcare options prior to kindergarten. The relatively smaller declines in women’s share of couples’ earnings with parenthood in the US and the UK reflect a policy environment where care is seen as a private family responsibility and the dual-earner family model is more widespread.

Changes in women’s share of couple earnings can result from various processes. For example, it is possible that both men and women reduce work commitments with a newborn, but that women’s reductions are greater than men’s. It is also possible that women remain employed but change jobs that pay less and result in a decline in her share of earnings. Our evidence suggests neither of these patterns.

Instead, our results show that in all three countries women’s share of couple earnings declines largely because women reduce employment and work hours, while men change neither. Our analyses show no evidence that men’s employment changes over the transition to parenthood, whereas women’s employment drops by almost 20 percentage points in the US and nearly 40 percentage points in Germany. Changes in women’s work hours are similarly large and have a significant impact on women’s share of couple earnings, while changes in women’s wages are smaller and do not contribute as much to changes in her earnings share.

When we broke down the analysis by whether or not the mother had a college degree, we found additional and important differences across the three countries. In Germany and the UK, the declines in women’s share of couple earnings are smaller among couples with a college-educated mother than those with a less-educated mother. This pattern is consistent with the expectation that women’s employment trajectories respond to their earnings potential and that women who have the most to lose from dropping out of the labor force are the most likely to remain employed after they become mothers.

In the US, however, we find the opposite, that declines in women’s share of couple earnings are relatively larger among couples with a college-educated versus less-educated mother. The difference between the two groups is not very large, but the pattern is distinct in substantive and meaningful ways, especially from what we see in Germany.

The fact that increases in gender inequality within couples in the US are smaller among the less-educated is consistent with the idea that a weak welfare and work-family policy environment puts couples under distinctive economic pressures. At the low end of the education distribution, US couples are less buffered by resources to manage work and family demands, in terms of their own earnings to purchase childcare and other services, but also in their ability to rely solely on one partner’s earnings to make ends meet. They face strong financial pressure to remain attached to the labor market following birth. At the high end, long and inflexible hours in professional jobs make it difficult for college-educated to maintain dual-earner families, and reliance on one income may prove a more viable option for some.

On the whole our analyses show that: 1) parenthood results in substantial and long-term increases in gender inequality within couples, 2) these increases result from changes in women’s work patterns following parenthood, not men’s, and 3) policy and cultural contexts shape how couples strategize time and money after parenthood. Together, these findings highlight how the transition to parenthood can deepen inequalities within couples as they navigate this new stage of their family life. Importantly, the gendered earnings disparities that emerge may negatively impact other domains of family life, including power dynamics between partners, household decision-making, and mothers’ economic independence. Although income gaps between women and men without children may be closing, our study illuminates how the transition to parenthood produces persistent income gaps within couples.

Pilar Gonalons-Pons is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania.  Kelly Musick is a Professor and Department Chair of Policy Analysis and Management at Cornell University.  Megan Doherty Bea is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Consumer Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Reprinted from the Chicago Tribune.

We are facing so many crises all at the same time. Covid-19 infections rates are again rising statewide, a pandemic of racial oppression has spawned an uprising in our city as well as around the Globe, and sky high unemployment rates threaten the stability of Illinois families. Our most immediate crisis is what to do with the kids this fall. Chicago Public Schools are starting the year online entirely, perhaps offering a hybrid model in the next quarter. Can this really work? For children? For their parents?

How’s a parent to keep their own job with children at home as much as they are in school?  Parents lucky enough to still be employed are literally at their wits end trying to figure out how to keep their own jobs while becoming their children’s teachers. Research shows some mothers are already reducing their hours in the labor force.

You simply cannot be both a worker and a full-time parent teacher at the same moment.

We need the option for children to learn at home, without disrupting their parent’s employment. Let’s hire some of those unemployed workers to be “learning pod” supervisors for children in small groups in their own homes. All kids need supervision to learn at home, not just those whose parents can afford the time or money.

Middle class parents are already exploring the option of “learning pods” for their children’s home schooling. A “learning pod” can be several families who gather their children together taking turns supervising online education. For wealthier families, a pod might mean hiring someone to supervise (or even teach) children so that the parents can meet their work responsibilities. So what’s the catch?

Given the differential percentage of white, Black and Latinx children whose parents can create learning pods, their very existence for some but not all of America’s children will increase racial inequality. The children of bus drivers, grocery store clerks, and janitors will not benefit from pods. The children who will benefit are those of middle-class workers who can share the pod parent duty, or those wealthy enough to hire someone else to do it.

A problem with roots in systemic racial inequality cannot have a solution in the individual choice of parents.

If schools are closed, we need home-based alternatives. In an analysis my colleagues and I did for the New York Times, we found evidence that it is mothers who are doing the vast majority of home-schooling. Some estimates are that it may take a generation for women to regain the level of  gender (in)equality we have in 2020 as women are pushed out of the labor force because their children are not going to school.

I propose a child care infrastructure to be a new work progress administration (WPA). The New Deal WPA put unemployed Americans back to work during the Great Depression building roads, and other infrastructure. This 21^st Century WPA should build an infrastructure of care starting by matching unemployed people with families in their own communities, and employ them as “pod supervisors.” Teachers could have direct communication with all the Pod supervisors for their students. In the absence of open schools, “learning pods” could work for our entire community, not just for the middle-class primarily white parents who can spend the time to host it or have the money to  pay for it.

The federal government should fund the WPA again. Unfortunately, the federal government has shown itself too dysfunctional to manage any federal response to the pandemic. And so if it does not, it falls to the states, or even the cities to do so. Are you listening Governor Pritzker and Mayor Lightfoot? The organization and hiring  has to be done at the local level. We aren’t going to find people with any kind of certification for these jobs, as they must start so quickly. These “pod supervisors” are to help  children do their online work, assigned and assessed by teachers.

The WPA is the only way to move forward quickly educating students, without risking increasing infection rates. This solution does not increase gender inequality by pushing mothers out of the labor nor increase racial achievement gaps by privatizing the supervision of online schooling. There are problems that will need to be worked out, but we must move quickly. So far the United States of America has totally mismanaged this health crises, now is our chance to find an innovative solution for children without contributing to racial and gender inequality. We can do it America. Let’s fund a new care taking WPA.

Barbara J. Risman, Ph.D., is a sociology professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and author of Where The Millennials Will Take Us: A New Generation Wrestles with the Gender Structure.