{"id":2373,"date":"2020-10-27T07:34:20","date_gmt":"2020-10-27T12:34:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/?p=2373"},"modified":"2020-10-26T13:34:49","modified_gmt":"2020-10-26T18:34:49","slug":"telecommuting-gets-mixed-results-for-gender-equity-at-home-and-women-are-more-depressed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/2020\/10\/27\/telecommuting-gets-mixed-results-for-gender-equity-at-home-and-women-are-more-depressed\/","title":{"rendered":"Telecommuting Gets Mixed Results for Gender Equity at Home, and Women Are More Depressed"},"content":{"rendered":"

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.<\/em>\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

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\u2019s well-being at home and at work?<\/p>\n

A unique new study,\u00a0Before and During COVID-19: Telecommuting, Work-Family Conflict, and Gender Equality<\/strong><\/a>,<\/strong> released by the\u00a0Council on Contemporary Families<\/a>, compares parents who were telecommuting before the pandemic and after. The good news? Telecommuting fathers do a lot more childcare than other fathers \u2013 enough more to actually even out their time with moms. The bad news? They don\u2019t increase their daily housework at all, while telecommuting women increase theirs by almost 50 minutes. The\u00a0really<\/em>\u00a0bad news? Telecommuting during the pandemic increases mothers\u2019 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.<\/p>\n

Investigators Thomas Lyttelton (Yale Sociology, Emma Zang (Yale Sociology), and Kelly Musick (Cornell Policy Analysis and Management)\u00a0examined time use data<\/a>\u00a0from parents who were telecommuting from before COVID-10 and after. Using data from the 2003-2018 American Time Use Survey (ATUS,\u00a0N\u00a0<\/em>= 19,179) and the April and May 2020 COVID Impact Survey (N<\/em>\u00a0= 784), they found two distinct patterns of adjustment telecommuting, pre COVID-19:<\/p>\n

Telecommuting dads closed the gender gap on childcare.<\/strong>\u00a0Pre 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\u2019 increases on work-from-home days.<\/p>\n

For housework, the gender gap got worse.\u00a0<\/strong>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.<\/p>\n

Work-family spillover hits telecommuting moms hard.\u00a0<\/strong>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.<\/p>\n

And in the pandemic, telecommuting moms report especially elevated stress.<\/strong>\u00a0Telecommuting moms are more depressed and stressed than moms who work outside the home \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

The authors note: \u201cThe 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\u2026. Mothers telecommuting in April \u2013 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

What are those rates of stress now?<\/strong>\u00a0In the pandemic, 20 percent of mothers working from home report feeling depressed, while 11 percent of fathers working from home do.\u00a0For anxiety<\/strong>, six percent of fathers working from home report it, while three times as many mothers \u2014 18 percent \u2014 working from home report it. (See Figure 2 in the brief for additional details.)<\/p>\n

Where does this leave us?
\n<\/strong>\u201cTelecommuting 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\u00a0reintegrated<\/em>\u00a0into 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,\u201d notes Stephanie Coontz, CCF Director of Research.<\/p>\n

\u201cBy 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\u2019s a source of gender inequality at home\u00a0and<\/em>\u00a0at work,\u201d Coontz concludes.<\/p>\n

LINKS AND ABOUT:
\n<\/strong>Brief report:\u00a0https:\/\/contemporaryfamilies.org\/covid-19-telecommuting-work-family-conflict-and-gender-equality\/<\/a>
\nPress release:\u00a0https:\/\/contemporaryfamilies.org\/covid-19-telecommuting-work-family-conflict-and-gender-equality-advisory\/<\/a><\/p>\n

Virginia Rutter is co-editor of\u00a0Families as They Really Are<\/a>. Follow her at @VirginiaRutter.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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.\u00a0 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2095,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38845],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2373","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-new-work"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2373","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2095"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2373"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2373\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2374,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2373\/revisions\/2374"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2373"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2373"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2373"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}