Pandemic put more parenting stress on mothers
ITHACA, N.Y. - A first-of-its-kind study of parents’ work arrangements during the pandemic shows that mothers working from home increased their supervisory parenting fully two hours more than fathers did, and women were also more likely to adapt their work schedules to new parenting demands.
The study used time diaries to examine how working parents managed school closures and childcare disruptions during the COVID-19 pandemic – thought to be the first such use of that data.
“We found that women working from home shouldered more of the parenting burden during the pandemic,” said researcher Kelly Musick, professor of public policy and sociology and senior associate dean of research in the Cornell Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy. “While the shift to work from home offered more flexibility, the lack of separation between work and family contributed to more challenging work environments, especially among mothers.”
An article detailing their findings, “Parents’ Work Arrangements and Gendered Time Use During the COVID-19 Pandemic,” published Dec. 9 in the Journal of Marriage and Family. Thomas Lyttelton of the Copenhagen Business School in Denmark was the lead author and Yale University sociologist Emma Zang and Musick were co-authors.
The researchers delved into data from the 2017–20 American Time Use Survey. A representative sample of Americans recorded their daily activities in detail, noting how long they spent on each task, where they were and who was present. Those records were then compared with how parents allotted their time prior to the pandemic, resulting in these key findings:
- There was no increase among parents working from home or on site in total childcare time as a primary focus, such as when feeding or bathing, playing, or reading to the kids. The added hours were in supervisory tasks – monitoring activities and making sure young ones were safe, while also doing other activities, often paid work – and that’s where the two-hour gap between women and men emerged. “The much larger increase among mothers relative to fathers in supervisory care points to mothers’ disproportionate responsibility for children,” Musick said.
- When activities did not involve multitasking or affect work duties, there was a more even divide between mothers and fathers. Moms disproportionately increased their time playing with children during the pandemic, and dads took on more household chores. That’s a reverse from what evidence suggests about home lives prior to the pandemic.
- While the pandemic afforded parents more time at home with children, the majority of that time was spent juggling paid work. Parents working on site experienced no such changes. All mothers – both working on site and at home – also altered their work schedules during the pandemic, increasing nonstandard hours and spells of work throughout the day, presumably to better accommodate increased parenting demands.
While the study focused on the pandemic, the findings have important implications for work and family in a post-pandemic world characterized by more remote work.
“The pandemic highlights a work culture unaccommodating of care demands and a policy infrastructure ill-equipped to support working parents,” Musick said. “Change is needed at both the public and private levels to better accommodate the health, productivity, and well-being of working families.”
JOURNAL
Journal of Marriage and Family
ARTICLE TITLE
Parents' work arrangements and gendered time use during the COVID-19 pandemic
Couples don’t have the same experience when both work from home
Gender differences found in studies in China, South Korea
Peer-Reviewed PublicationCOLUMBUS, Ohio – In dual-earner couples, working from home may be a better deal for husbands than wives in some ways, according to two related studies of workers in China and South Korea.
The research showed that both husbands and wives completed more family-related tasks when they worked from home versus the office. However, when wives worked from home, husbands completed fewer family tasks than when their wives worked in the office. Wives did not complete fewer tasks when husbands worked from home.
In addition, wives in both studies felt increased guilt about failing to accomplish housework and spending time with their families when they did more work at the office. In men, that result was found in one study.
“We found that men and women don’t have the same experience working from home,” said Jasmine Hu, lead author of the study and professor of management at The Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business.
“There are still some gendered differences in how they manage their job and family responsibilities.”
The study was published recently in the journal Personnel Psychology.
The researchers did two studies, both during the COVID-19 pandemic. One study involved 172 married dual-earner couples in mainland China who had at least one child. That study was done near the beginning of the pandemic in April and May of 2020.
The second study was done in South Korea, later in the pandemic from June to August 2021. This involved 60 dual-earner couples, some with children and some without.
In both surveys, all participants completed two surveys each day for 14 consecutive workdays. Each husband and wife reported their work-from-home status and the amount of work and family tasks they completed.
They also completed various measures, which could include work-family conflict and family-work conflict, how much guilt they felt toward their families and their work, and their psychological withdrawal from work and family.
Findings showed that when husbands had flexible work schedules, wives completed significantly more work tasks when working from home than in the office. When wives had inflexible work arrangements, husbands completed significantly more family tasks when working from home.
“These findings suggest that husbands could help remote working wives when they have more flexible work schedules and do more family tasks when their wives have more rigid work schedules,” Hu said.
Overall, the results suggested that when the boundaries between work and family time are blurry, dual-earner couples feel the conflict.
Findings showed that when employees (both husbands and wives) worked from home, they increased how much work they completed around their home and family, but that increased their feelings of inter-role conflict, psychological withdrawal from work and feelings of guilt concerning work for their employer.
“Managers should form realistic expectations about how much work their remote working employees can effectively handle and show more understanding of the home working situations of dual-earner couples,” Hu said.
Hu said the results suggest husbands with flexibility in scheduling work time can provide more support for their wives to complete their remote work tasks.
“Organizations and managers should give their male employees more flexibility when possible so they and their families can better adapt to crises like the COVID-19 pandemic,” she said.
While many of the work-from-home policies this study investigated were put into place because of the pandemic, Hu said that things won’t go back to the way they were when the pandemic is over.
“COVID-19 forever changed how we work. Remote working is going to become much more of a norm,” she said.
“People have really gotten used to the benefit of working from home and many won’t want to go back to the office full time.”
Hu said she sees hybrid work as the best possible future for working couples.
“This will allow employees to have the flexibility they get from working at home, while also having the opportunity to interact more with colleagues at the office, which can increase collaboration and inspire creativity and innovation,” she said.
JOURNAL
Personnel Psychology
METHOD OF RESEARCH
Observational study
SUBJECT OF RESEARCH
People
ARTICLE TITLE
Double challenges: How working from home affects dual-earner couples’ work-family experiences
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