He’s Working from Home and I’m at Home Trying to Work: Experiences of Childcare and the Work–Family Balance Among Mothers During COVID-19

This article captures mothers’ experiences of the work–family balance and division of household labor during the initial COVID-19 lockdown. Interviews were conducted with twenty-five academics and twenty professionals in other fields. Mothers who split childcare with their partners had a more positive experience of the work–family balance during lockdown, compared with mothers who did the majority of the childcare. The present study adds a new wrinkle into the literature on flexibility and work–family balance: the perception of flexibility and its impact on the division of labor. Academic mothers, who had always had highly “flexible” jobs, were less likely to split childcare with their partners pre-pandemic and thus less likely to have positive experiences of work–family balance during the Spring 2020 lockdown. I argue that perceived flexibility of a partner’s job affected allocation of childcare during the initial stages of the pandemic, a moment that wreaked significant harm on women’s careers.

The Impact of Marital Status on Work Hours: A Quantitative Study of European Labor Market from Gender Perspective

This article examines the effects of marital status to the gender gap in employment hours. This article uses linear regression analysis with data from the European Social Survey Round 8. Stata/SE 16 is used to analyze the data collected from 18 European countries to explore the research questions. Previous literatures identify some determinants of work hours such as demographic characteristics, the division of household labor, job characteristics, and country-level determinants (e.g., welfare state, work-hour regulations, family policies, part-time labor force participation etc.), but there are few studies on marital status as determinant of work hours. This article finds that there is an interaction among marital status and work hours to the different levels of gender. This article shows that there is a gender inequality in the European labor market, where men’s work hours are more than women’s work hours. Unmarried women work less hours than any other studied categories of marital status (e.g., married, divorced).

Lessons Learned

This chapter recounts societal aspirations for families as postfeminist, gender-neutral spaces at the beginning of the twenty-first century that have outpaced the actual rate of social change, particularly in heterosexual families. It points out how gendered patterns in the division of household labor and workplace disadvantage remain stubbornly entrenched. It also confirms parenting as the increasingly preferred gender-neutral label for the multifaceted work of providing care to children. The chapter explores how navigating contemporary motherhood meant navigating a discursively gender-neutral space as a person whose lived experience and interactions with social institutions are in fact quite gendered. It discusses the tensions between gender-neutral aspirations and discourse and gendered institutions, which shape the experiences of mothers without primary custody of their children.

Fairness Perceptions of the Division of Household Labor: Housework and Childcare

An unequal division of housework has been found to be often regarded as fair, which may explain why women still do most household labor. This study extends previous research by also investigating childcare—an increasingly important part of household labor, which is likely to have a different meaning than housework. It examines how perceptions of fairness for both housework and childcare are influenced by the division of housework, childcare, and paid labor, and whether patterns differ by gender. Data from the Netherlands (men: N = 462; women: N = 638) show that unequal divisions of housework, and especially childcare, are often perceived as fair. When it comes to how an increasingly unequal household labor division is related to unfairness, associations are stronger for women than for men. Fairness of the household labor division is evaluated in relation to total workload and not in isolation from other types of labor.

Longitudinal Associations Between Household Labor Division Inequity and Conflict Among Newlywed Couples

The division of household labor among couples is a frequently occurring topic of conflict. The present investigation examined longitudinal associations between inequities in household labor divisions and conflict about those divisions in 219 newly married heterosexual couples without children enrolled in the Louisiana Marriage Matters Panel Survey of Newlyweds. We used autoregressive latent trajectory models across three time points spanning approximately 3.5 years. More conflict about labor inequity was related to declines in household labor inequity by the next wave. Additionally, greater household labor inequity was related to declines in conflict by the next wave. We discuss findings in terms of the demand-response hypothesis and ideological reasons why higher labor inequities may relate to less conflict.

Division of Household Labor and Relationship Dissolution in Denmark 2001–2009

This article studies how the gender division in time spent on housework is associated with relationship dissolution among Danish couples. The use of time diary information on the actual time spent on housework for both partners leads to more precise measures than in previous studies. Two waves of the Danish Time Use Survey provided data on 3,434 couples linked to information from the Danish administrative population registries to observe union dissolution. Late entry hazard models were estimated to analyze how men’s contributions predicted dissolution risk after controlling for couple specific time-constant and time-varying covariates. The results show a U-shaped relationship between division of household labor and union dissolution with lowest risk when men provided 40% of the time on household tasks. Couples with the most unequal division of housework were the least stable. Even in a gender egalitarian society, women still perform more of the housework for relationships to be stable.