Council on Contemporary Families

Family Caregiving (for Adults, Children, and Disabilities)

U.S. parents financially support their adult children. But in immigrant families, it’s the reverse.

A briefing paper prepared for the Council on Contemporary Families by Vanessa Delgado, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Washington State University


Today, the majority of American parents financially support their adult children. Estimates suggest that only a quarter of young adults are financially independent and rely on their parents for financial support well into their 30s. Parents and their adult children are more financially interconnected than ever before.

However, in immigrant families, financial support is reversed.

Studies suggest that young adults with immigrant parents are more likely to “give back” financially when compared to young adults with native-born parents, that is, parents who are born in the U.S. Adult children of immigrants feel a greater sense of obligation to support their parents and actively contribute to medical bills, rent or mortgage, household expenses, and even work-related costs. Notably, adult children of immigrants even “give back” when they no longer live in the parental home.

Existing research assumes children of immigrants’ financial contributions are uniform. But I find they’re not.

In a study published in Social Problems, I argue that parental immigration status shapes adult children of immigrants’ decisions to “give back” in immigrant families. I find that young adults with undocumented parents are more likely to give back financially than young adults with documented parents. I also find that the adult children of undocumented immigrants are more likely to give direct cash transfers, pay household bills, develop financial plans for homeownership and retirement, open credit cards on behalf of parents, take on debt, and worry about their parents’ financial futures.

There are several reasons why the adult children of undocumented immigrants feel more obligated to “give back.” First, undocumented immigrants are more likely to take on precarious jobs that pay very little and do not provide important benefits like healthcare, overtime, and sick leave. Second, undocumented immigrants are prohibited from accessing federal social services such as the Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance (i.e., Social Security) Program, Medicaid or Medicare, and Food Supplementary Programs (i.e., food stamps). Third, many banks and retirement insurance policies require a social security number to open an account. Fourth, undocumented immigrants are subject to deportation, which financially devastates families. The adult children of undocumented immigrants feel compelled to take on a greater financial role in the family because their undocumented parents experience significant barriers to economic security.

Overall, this study demonstrates that immigration status is a powerful axis of stratification among immigrant families. An undocumented immigration status transforms the needs of immigrant families, as it blocks pathways to upward mobility and positions adult children of immigrants to take on greater financial responsibilities. The imprint of parental undocumented status is likely to follow young adults throughout the life course as the absence of amnesty relief reaches almost four decades and their undocumented parents grow older without access to public safety nets.

For More Information, Please Contact:

Vanessa Delgado, Ph.D
Assistant Professor of Sociology
Washington State University
Email: vanessa.delgado@wsu.edu
Twitter: @VanessaD015

Links

Brief report: https://sites.utexas.edu/contemporaryfamilies/2024/09/19/immigrant-families-financial-support-brief-report/

About CCF

The Council on Contemporary Families, based at the University of Texas-Austin, is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization of family researchers and practitioners that seeks to further a national understanding of how America’s families are changing and what is known about the strengths and weaknesses of different family forms and various family interventions For more information, contact Stephanie Coontz, Director of Research and Public Education, coontzs@msn.com. 

September 19th, 2024

Who Cares and Caring for Whom? Unpaid Caregiving by Gender and Sexual Identity

A briefing paper prepared for the Council on Contemporary Families by Zhe (Meredith) Zhang, California State University, Los Angeles

Many people have the experience of providing care to family and friends with serious health conditions or limitations. Most people will provide such unpaid care to their loved ones at some point in their lives. In 2020, about 53 million U.S. adults or 21.3% of the population provided unpaid care such as preparing meals, providing transportation, managing medications, dressing, or bathing a loved one with health limitations or disabilities in the past year. This number of caregivers will continue to rise with the aging American population as most of those receiving such care are older adults.

In a class of mine, I asked the students who would come to their minds when they thought about unpaid caregivers. Most of them mentioned a wife, daughter, sister, or mother. Their observations are consistent with the established research, which has found that in general, women are more likely to be providing care than men.

However, one limitation of this prior research is that it seldom considers sexual orientation. A burgeoning literature suggests that sexual minorities may provide more care than heterosexuals, but many questions remain unanswered. Does it mean that gay and bisexual men are more likely to provide care than heterosexual men? Are women’s higher caregiving rates only prominent among heterosexuals? Do sexual minority men have similar caregiving rates as sexual minority women?

We need to consider sexual orientation in a study of caregiving for several reasons. First, the number of Americans identifying as a sexual minority (e.g., gay, lesbian, bisexual, queer) has continued to increase for the past decade (Jones 2022). Second, gay, lesbian, and bisexual adults have lower partnership and childbearing rates than heterosexuals, which may lead to different caregiving networks and demands (Croghan et al. 2014; Ismail et al. 2020). For instance, sexual minorities’ lower partnership rate relative to heterosexuals may mean that they have fewer demands of providing care to an aging partner.

In a paper recently published in Demography (Zhang et al. 2024), my coauthors and I examined how unpaid caregiving is associated with both gender and sexual identity. One of the main findings in our paper is that not all men have lower caregiving rates relative to women. It is only among heterosexuals that we see a lower caregiving rate among men than women. Gay and bisexual men have similar caregiving rates as lesbian and bisexual women. Heterosexual men’s caregiving rate is much lower than that of bisexual men. This low caregiving rate for heterosexual men may reflect their stricter adherence to gender norms around division of labor (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005), which emphasize that men are responsible for paid work and women are responsible for domestic work such as caregiving. On the other hand, gay and bisexual men in the U.S. tend to hold less conservative views on gender (Denise 2019), which may help explain their higher caregiving rates.

Next, we examined whether the association between unpaid caregiving, gender, and sexual identity varied by partnership status (i.e., whether one is married/in a relationship). We found that unpartnered bisexual men were more likely to provide care than unpartnered heterosexual men, unpartnered gay men, and partnered bisexual men. Bisexual people generally report less social support from family, friends, and LGBT+ communities than heterosexuals and gay/lesbian adults (Dodge et al. 2012; Gorman et al. 2015). Additionally, bisexual men may experience unique stressors related to the perceptions that bisexual men are either not fully “out” as gay men or are unfairly tied to straight privilege (Anderson and McCormack 2016). Feeling even more isolated, unpartnered bisexual men may be particularly incentivized to provide care to a loved one to facilitate more social connection.

To further understand the experiences of these caregivers, we also examined caregivers’ relationship to the care recipient. Among the caregivers, we found that gay, lesbian, and bisexual caregivers generally reported less spouse/partner caregiving than heterosexual men and women, likely because they are less likely to have a partner than heterosexuals. The absence of a partner probably makes sexual minorities more available to care for other loved ones, such as grandparents. We found that sexual minority caregivers were more likely to provide care to a grandparent relative to their heterosexual peers. We also found that heterosexual, gay, lesbian, and bisexual caregivers had similar rates of parental caregiving. This echoes prior work, which showed that sexual minority adult children continued to provide care for older parents even when parents disapproved of their sexuality (Cronin et al. 2011; Reczek and Umberson 2016).

Additionally, we find higher rates of friend caregiving among sexual minority caregivers, particularly among lesbian women. Among the caregivers, nearly a quarter of lesbian women were caring for a friend compared to 14% of heterosexual women. In additional analysis that considers partnership status, we also found that gay men without a partner had higher rates of caring for friends (33%) than unpartnered heterosexual (21%) and bisexual men (15%). In general, prior work has shown that sexual minorities, many of whom are alienated from families of origin, have long built families of choice with whom they share no biological or legal relationship (Lavender-Stott and Allen 2023; MetLife 2010). Research has shown that sexual minorities often provide care to friends that are part of these chosen families. During the HIV/AIDS epidemic, most people infected with HIV identified a gay friend as both their primary caregiver and family (Fredriksen-Goldsen 2007). Taken together, our results suggest that caregiving for a friend may be particularly common among lesbian women and unpartnered gay men.

Overall, our study provides a comprehensive overview of caregiving rates by gender, sexual identity, and partnership status among American adults. We find that women’s higher caregiving rate relative to men’s is only prominent among heterosexuals. Caregiving rates do not differ by sexuality among women, but bisexual men (especially those without a partner) have a much higher caregiving rate than heterosexual men. We also find that among the caregivers, adults of varying gender and sexual identity groups may provide care to different social ties (e.g., parents, partners, or friends). Altogether, our findings help advance understanding of caregiving and changing family ties in an era of population aging and increasing diversity in sexual identities.

For More Information, Please Contact:

Zhe (Meredith) Zhang
Assistant Professor of Sociology
California State University, Los Angeles
mzhang19@calstatela.edu

Links

Brief report: https://sites.utexas.edu/contemporaryfamilies/2024/05/23/unpaid-caregiving-brief-report/
Press release: https://sites.utexas.edu/contemporaryfamilies/2024/05/23/unpaid-caregiving-press-release/

About CCF

The Council on Contemporary Families, based at the University of Texas-Austin, is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization of family researchers and practitioners that seeks to further a national understanding of how America’s families are changing and what is known about the strengths and weaknesses of different family forms and various family interventions For more information, contact Stephanie Coontz, Director of Research and Public Education, coontzs@msn.com. 

References

Anderson, E., & McCormack, M. (2016). The changing dynamics of bisexual men’s lives: Social research perspectives. Cham, Switzerland: Springer Nature.

Connell, R. W., & Messerschmidt, J. W. (2005). Hegemonic masculinity: Rethinking the concept. Gender & Society, 19, 829–859.

Croghan, C. F., Moone, R. P., & Olson, A. M. (2014). Friends, family, and caregiving among midlife and older lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender adults. Journal of Homosexuality, 61, 79–102.

Cronin, A., Ward, R., Pugh, S., King, A., & Price, E. (2011). Categories and their consequences: Understanding and supporting the caring relationships of older lesbian, gay and bisexual people. International Social Work, 54, 421–435.

Denise, E. J. (2019). Americans’ gender attitudes at the intersection of sexual orientation and gender. Journal of Homosexuality, 66, 141–172.

Dodge, B., Schnarrs, P. W., Reece, M., Goncalves, G., Martinez, O., Nix, R., . . . Fortenberry, J. D. (2012). Community involvement among behaviourally bisexual men in the midwestern USA: Experiences and perceptions across communities. Culture, Health & Sexuality, 14, 1095–1110.

Fredriksen-Goldsen, K. I. (2007). HIV/AIDS caregiving: Predictors of well-being and distress. Journal of Gay & Lesbian Social Services, 18(3–4), 53–73.

Gorman, B. K., Denney, J. T., Dowdy, H., & Medeiros, R. A. (2015). A new piece of the puzzle: Sexual orientation, gender, and physical health status. Demography, 52, 1357–1382.

Ismail, M., Hammond, N. G., Wilson, K., & Stinchcombe, A. (2020). Canadians who care: Social networks and informal caregiving among lesbian, gay, and bisexual older adults in the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging. International Journal of Aging and Human Development, 91, 299–316.

Jones, J. M. (2022, February 17). LGBT Identification in U.S. Ticks Up to 7.1%. Gallup News. Retrieved from https://news.gallup.com/poll/389792/lgbt-identification-ticks-up.aspx

Lavender‐Stott, E. S., & Allen, K. R. (2023). Not alone: Family experiences across the life course of single, baby boom sexual‐minority women. Family Relations, 72, 140–158.

MetLife Mature Market Institute. (2010). Out and aging: The MetLife study of lesbian and gay baby boomers. Journal of GLBT Family Studies, 6, 40–57.

Reczek, C., & Umberson, D. (2016). Greedy spouse, needy parent: The marital dynamics of gay, lesbian, and heterosexual intergenerational caregivers. Journal of Marriage and Family, 78, 957–974.

Zhang, Z., Smith-Johnson, M. & Gorman, B. K. (2024). Who cares? unpaid caregiving by sexual identity, gender, and partnership status among U.S. adults.” Demography, DOI 10.1215/00703370-11145841.

May 23, 2024

Dads Home with Kids Peaked During The COVID-19 Pandemic – But Not for The Reason You Think

A briefing paper prepared by Arielle Kuperberg, University of North Carolina – Greensboro,  Sarah Thébaud, University of California, Santa Barbara, Kathleen Gerson, New York University,  and Brad Harrington, Boston College, for the Council on Contemporary Families symposium The COVID-19 Pandemic and the Future of Gender Equality (PDF).

More dads were out of the labor force during the COVID-19 pandemic than ever before. In 2021, 15% of U.S. dads who lived with their children weren’t working, and weren’t actively searching for work – an all-time high (see Figure 1).   


Figure 1: Growth in Dads at Home, 1968-2022. Analysis of Current Population Survey Data, Yearly March Supplement, conducted using the ipums.org online data analyzer. Analysis includes all men living with their own children under age 18 at time of survey, and is nationally representative of the United States. Update and expansion of results previously published. Data analyzed by authors for Council on Contemporary Families. 

But according to them, it wasn’t because they were taking care of the kids. Only one-percent of dads who lived with their children in 2021 and 2022 (fewer than 1 of 10 dads out of the labor force) said they were not looking for a job because they were taking care of home and family. Instead, almost all of the recent growth in dads out of the workforce has been the result of an increase in those who report that they are “retired.” In 2000, 4.4% of dads living with their minor children were retired; by 2022, this had risen to 7.4%, accounting for about half of dads living with their children who were out of the labor force. 

The rise in retirement rates was a result of two trends. One is that fewer young men are having children. Recent PEW reports found that 63% of young men are single, and that birth rates have dropped to record lows. Our analysis of the Current Population Survey – March Supplement, a nationally representative annual survey of U.S. adults, found that in 2000, 44% of men in their 30s were not living with any of their own minor children – but by 2022 this number was almost 55%. We found rates of fatherhood are staying steady for men in their 40s and slightly growing among men in their 50s and 60s, so a larger share of dads are older.

Second, our analysis of the data found a growing share of even younger dads in their 50s, 40s, and even 30s say they are retired. During the early years of the COVID-19 pandemic, more dads retired than usual, as health risks, lack of child care, and labor market upheavals drove many workers out of the paid workforce. Taken together, the increase in fathers out of the paid labor force are more a result of trends in fathers’ aging and retirement than changing ideas about gender, work and parenthood.


Figure 2: Fathers and Mothers Living with their own Children under Age 18, 2021. Authors’ Analysis of Current Population Survey – March Supplement Data.

But why aren’t more dads stepping up to stay home to care for home and family? After all, in an increasing number of families, including an increasing number of two-parent married families, mothers are the sole or “primary earners” (earning over 60% of the household income) for at least part of their children’s childhood. But while rates of moms staying home with kids have declined over time, we found that even when the proportion of dads out of the labor force reached peak rates in 2021, mothers living with their children were over ten times as likely as fathers living with their children to report they were home to take care of home and children(see Figure 2). 

Our collective research suggests that culturally entrenched ideas about masculinity, fatherhood, and breadwinning still shape gender differences in staying home to care for children. Although men value care, and society increasingly values fathers as caregivers, dads are still most strongly judged on their roles as workers and financial providers, limiting their ability to comfortably take on caring roles.

In research-in-progress on trait desirability for American men and women, Thébaud & colleagues find that, in one sense, people’s perspectives on masculinity do appear to beevolving: most people believe it is highly socially desirable for men, especially fathers, to be caring, supportive, family-oriented, kind, and affectionate. In fact, these traits were perceived to be just as desirable in men as other, more stereotypically masculine, attributes like competitiveness and risk-taking. However, they also found that this apparent desirability for men to be engaged in caregiving is overshadowed by an extremely strong and durable expectation that men prioritize work: being hardworking, ambitious, career-oriented, and a provider were rated as the most highly desirable attributes in men. 

Additional research by Harrington, Thébaud and colleagues further illustrates this duality in fatherhood expectations. In a study of more than a thousand working parents in professional occupations, more than three quarters would ideally prefer to share caregiving responsibilities equally with their spouse. But fewer than half were actually able to achieve that ideal in their day to day lives. Why? Workplace culture and expectations – especially the often taken-for-granted notion that the best workers are those who prioritize work over outside responsibilities – are one important culprit. That is, even when fathers would ideally like to share caregiving equally with their spouse, and even when they work in organizations that offer generous policies and benefits, the presence of intense work demands and expectations in their workplace can dramatically reduce their chances of achieving that ideal. 

Restrictive ideas about masculinity, gender and work also shape young people’s outlooks. In another study by Gerson, 120 millennials were interviewed about how they envisioned their work and family ties. She found that most men and women aspired to share paid work and caregiving in an egalitarian partnership, yet they were skeptical about the chances of achieving this goal. Men felt constrained by the need to put work first, which meant they looked to a partner to do most of the caregiving. Yet women did not share this view. They wished to avoid a “traditional” relationship that expected them to do most of childcare, even if that meant remaining single and either forgoing childbearing or bearing and supporting a child on their own. Such perspectives may explain recent declines in childbearing.  

The enduring expectation that fathers should prioritize work is apparent in how stay-at-home dads are viewed and treated. Research by Kuperberg and colleagues examining news articles about stay-at-home dads over 30 years indicates that while stigma surrounding stay-at-home dads has declined over time, dads who voluntarily choose to stay home with their kids are still described as being ridiculed, excluded, and socially isolated, receiving “strange looks” and “snide comments.” This persistent stigma may explain why out-of-work dads in their 30s, 40s, and 50s increasingly describe themselves as “retired,” but not “taking care of home and family.”

This kind of social environment – in which father’s caregiving is highly valued, but their employment and career devotion remains virtually non-negotiable – severely limits the range of options that parents face when it comes to figuring out how to best organize work and family responsibilities. 

To achieve gender equality in work and family roles, it seems clear that we need greater attention to fathers, fatherhood, and ideas about masculinity and work. The pandemic pushed more fathers to “retire” before their children were adults, and potentially take on more caretaking roles at home. Other research in this symposium also finds that remote work led to greater equality in home roles. As more dads gained experience with caretaking roles during the pandemic, and economic forces continue to shift, families may continue to rely on dads for childcare at higher rates, creating new possibilities for families. 

About the Authors

Arielle Kuperberg is Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina – Greensboro and Chair of the Council on Contemporary Families. She can be reached at atkuperb@uncg.edu. Follow her on Twitter at @ATKuperberg.

Sarah Thébaud is Professor of Sociology and Director of Graduate Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She can be reached at sthebaud@ucsb.edu. Twitter: @sthebaud1.

Kathleen Gerson is Professor of Sociology and Collegiate Professor of Arts & Science at New York University. She can be reached at kathleen.gerson@nyu.edu. You can follow her on Twitter at @KathleenGerson.

Brad Harrington is a Research Professor and Executive Director of the Boston College Center for Work & Family. He can be reached at brad.harrington@bc.edu. You can follow him on Twitter @DrBradH.

Can Remote Work Fuel Gender Equality? Evidence Shows Cause for Optimism but Challenges Remain

A briefing paper prepared by Wen Fan, Boston University, and Richard J. Petts, Ball State University, for the Council on Contemporary Families symposium The COVID-19 Pandemic and the Future of Gender Equality (PDF).

[Acknowledgement: The authors greatly appreciate Jennifer Glass and Jerry Jacobs for their generous feedback on a previous version of the briefing paper.]

The COVID-19 pandemic transformed where paid work is done, leading millions to become remote workers overnight. Large numbers (40% of full-time employees) continue to work remotely three years following the pandemic onset, and workers today highly value flexible work options. Yet, access to, and use of, fully remote or hybrid (i.e., partially remote) work (remote work for short hereafter) remains uneven. Notably, men are more likely to say they can work from home, but of those who can work remotely, women work from home more than men. Gender differences in perceptions and experiences of remote work are also complex, as these forms of flexible work are associated with stigmas for men and discussed as both “a blessing and a curse” for women. These gender differences raise important questions about the consequences of remote work for gender equality; does remote work promote gender equality or in fact widen the long-existing gender gap in paid and unpaid labor?

Two new research projects provide insight into the implications of pandemic-induced remote work for gender equality. One study, the Study on U.S. Parents’ Divisions of Labor During COVID-19 (SPDLC), is a longitudinal survey of partnered U.S. parents residing with a biological child administered from April 2020 to October 2022. Another study, the Remote Work Dynamics Panel Study, is a four-wave, nationally representative survey of U.S. workers who spent at least some time working from home since the onset of the pandemic (October 2020 to April 2022). Collectively, these two projects show that remote work fosters gender equality in some dimensions but perpetuates gender inequalities in other domains.

How Remote Work Enhances Gender Equality

New evidence from these projects highlights two ways in which increased access to remote work might promote gender equality. First, remote work allows women, especially less educated women, to work in a place they prefer. Working from home has been historically popular among women as it enables them to maintain their attachment to the paid labor force while also managing housework and childcare. Greater access to remote work since the pandemic thus disproportionately helps women (more than it does for men) to align where they work with their preferences. When women wanted to work from home but had to go back to the office because of employer mandates, evidence shows that they tended to leave the labor force, at least in the short term. And this is especially the case for women without a college degree, who have fewer options than men or more educated women in locating a new job with remote options.

Second, among heterosexual partnered parents, remote work provides opportunities for fathers to share domestic labor, which also strengthens mothers’ labor force attachment. When partnered fathers worked from home more frequently during the pandemic, partnered mothers performed smaller shares of housework and childcare; mothers were additionally more likely to be employed and worked more hours in paid labor, thereby reducing the well-known gender gap in both paid and unpaid labor. The pattern is even more pronounced when fathers worked exclusively from home. Working from home likely exposes fathers to domestic labor and allows them to have more time to perform these tasks, which, in turn, enables their partners to spend more hours in paid labor.

How Remote Work Hinders Gender Equality

Despite the potential for remote work to promote gender equality, results from these projects also illustrate ways in which remote work widened some gender gaps in both domestic and paid labor during the pandemic. In the initial transition into remote work, results show a deeply gendered process with women more likely than men to experience change—either a major decrease or a major increase—in work hours. Men had more control over the hours they work, making a deliberate decision to work the same hours and being able to maintain high productivity due to fewer interruptions when working from home. In contrast, findings based on partnered parents show that mothers with job flexibility tended to scale back their work hours to accommodate housework and childcare duties, suggesting that enduring gender norms may have led mothers to prioritize the home front during the pandemic. Another strategy some mothers adopted to deal with domestic disruptions in the pandemic was to work longer hours, particularly non-conventional hours such as when children were in bed.

Another way in which remote work exacerbated gender inequality is that remote work helps improve the well-being of minoritized men more than women. Gender equality and racial equality are intricately linked. Given explicit and implicit racial bias, discrimination, and microaggressions in office environments, it has long been argued that remote work may contribute to the well-being of minoritized workers more than for white workers. New evidence shows that remote work promotes well-being generally, but across all gender/racial groups, men of color benefit the most from remote work. The generally lower occupational status of women of color may have limited the extent to which they emotionally and psychologically benefit from remote work.

Lessons from the Pandemic: The Future of Remote Work and Gender Equality

How then do we make sense of the mixed findings about the implications of increased access to remote work for gender equality? We believe that emerging evidence offers important lessons about the ways in which remote work can be used to promote greater gender equality in the U.S. beyond the pandemic. While there may not be a perfect one-size-fits-all remote work policy, we believe policies can be flexible enough to work for a wide range of companies and workers.

  1. For jobs that allow working from home, companies should provide workers equal access to remote work regardless of their gender. To avoid remote work being seen as just a policy for women, men should be incentivized to work remotely. Doing so may minimize stigmas associated with remote work while also promoting greater gender equality in domestic labor. This may also allow families to be more flexible, such as by alternating which partner works from home and which works in the office on any given day.

  2. There should be clear organizational guidelines and expectations for the day-to-day implementations of remote work. Given that remote work may in fact intensify job demands and further blur work–life boundaries, a consequence disproportionately borne by women, companies and organizations need to provide more job autonomy, set up clear expectations for remote workers, and focus on outcomes instead of office time as the metric for evaluation or promotion.

  3. While remote work can potentially help workers better manage work and family responsibilities, it is not a complete solution as these new findings show. Increased access to good, affordable childcare in conjunction with better, more equitable remote work policies, would increase the likelihood that both men and women maximize the benefits of remote work and decrease the likelihood of exacerbating gender gaps in domestic labor by reducing childcare burdens on mothers in particular.

  4. Better remote work policies are needed for women of color and less educated women. These workers are less likely to have access to remote work, despite desiring it more than men, and they tend to work in environments with high demands, low control, and low support—factors that mitigate the benefits of remote work. Organizational and public policies that create a more equitable workforce and promote more equitable working-from-home experiences—for example, IT expense reimbursement policies or “work-from-home pledges” that specify company norms around remote work—are essential for improving well-being among disadvantaged women workers.

About the Authors

Wen Fan is Associate Professor of Sociology at Boston College. She can be reached at wen.fan@bc.edu.

Richard J. Petts is a Professor of Sociology at Ball State University. His research focuses on the intersection of family, work, gender, and policy, and he serves on the Board of Directors of the Council on Contemporary Families. You can learn more about his research by visiting his website (www.richardpetts.com), following him on X (@pettsric), or via email (rjpetts@bsu.edu).

Pandemic Influences on Gender Inequality in Unpaid Work

A briefing paper prepared by Liana C. Sayer, University of Maryland and Joanna R. Pepin, University of Toronto for the Council on Contemporary Families online symposium The COVID-19 Pandemic and the Future of Gender Equality (PDF).

In the past, widespread economic impacts have affected gender dynamics in paid and unpaid work. For example, the concentration of job loss among men during the 2008 recession was associated with increases in married fathers’ household and care work. The COVID-19 pandemic produced an unprecedented economic crisis and it too brought about changes in parents’ employment. Job loss and reduced work hours were initially concentrated among women, particularly racial and ethnic minority women, and disproportionately affected mothers.

These employment changes alongside stay-at-home guidelines, restrictions on eating at restaurants, altered grocery shopping and cooking patterns, and public health guidance to sanitize living quarters led many scholars and pundits to speculate families were spending more of their time cooking and cleaning. Childcare closures and the shift to remote learning for schoolchildren upended parents’ expectations of the time necessary for supervising their children. Did these sharp disruptions to everyday family life affect gender inequality in unpaid work? And how are these changes associated with paid work during COVID?

On the one hand, gender inequality in unpaid work may have worsened during the pandemic. The lack of formal childcare and increased needs for cooking and cleaning were likely to affect mothers more than fathers due to expectations of intensive mothering and notions that women are primarily responsible for the household. On the other hand, greater access to remote work, especially among employed fathers, and a redistribution of daily activities (e.g., less time transporting children to extracurricular activities) may have facilitated more equality in sharing housework and childcare.

Same song, new verse?

Similar to what happened during the 2008 recession, initial research showed some signs that, in the early days of the pandemic, the parental gender gap in unpaid work narrowed. One study showed an 18% decrease in the number of minutes per day mothers and fathers spent with their children. In the Fall of 2019, the gender gap was about 175 minutes – nearly 3 hours – per day. By the Fall of 2020, the daily gap in time spent with children had declined to 144 minutes per day (about 2 hours 25 minutes). Another study, based on a non-probability sample of 1,025 US parents in different-gender partnerships, showed similar patterns. Although mothers continued to do more housework and childcare than fathers about one month into the pandemic, notably, fathers increased their contribution to the household labor. It was fathers’ greater time spent in unpaid labor that narrowed the gender gap.

However, as the pandemic carried on, evidence of lasting change didn’t materialize. A follow-up study showed that the shift toward more equal sharing of housework returned to pre-pandemic levels by November 2020. As childcare facilities remained closed and schools shifted to remote learning, mothers more than fathers rearranged their daily lives to provide more supervision for children’s school-related activities and to physically care for children at home. The return to mothers doing more of this work than fathers was rationalized by parents who pointed to structural constraints – such as the motherhood earnings penalty and fatherhood premium – and cultural prescriptions about appropriate behaviors for men and women.

The premier source of daily activity data, the American Time Use Survey, is now available for the years prior to the pandemic (2019), early in the pandemic (2020), and late in the pandemic (2021). A new study1 uses this data to show how the pandemic affected gender inequality in unpaid work among parents with children ages 12 and younger. The analysis focuses on changes from 2019 to 2021 in mothers’ and fathers’ time spent on housework and three types of childcare: 1) parental childcare (time when childcare is the primary task and only focus of attention); 2) secondary childcare (time when parents are monitoring children but not directly engaged in childcare or other activities with children); and 3) total time spent with children present (e.g., watching TV with children). The findings confirm the pandemic affected gender inequality in unpaid work and reveal that it did so unevenly across types of unpaid work.

The most striking finding is the lack of change in the gender gap in parental childcare time. There were no statistically significant changes in either mothers’ or fathers’ time providing childcare between 2019 and 2021, meaning mothers continued to do about 40 minutes more childcare per day than fathers. Time parents are actively providing care consists of both physical childcare (e.g., hands-on care and supervision) and developmental childcare (e.g., education, playing, talking). Between 2019 and 2020, mothers’ physical childcare decreased slightly, but this was counterbalanced by a modest increase in time spent on developmental childcare, and levels in 2021 were similar to 2019. This lack of change in primary childcare suggests that in 2020 parents redistributed time across specific types of childcare activities (such as away from driving children to organized activities to managing and supervising children’s remote education and play) rather than making larger investments of time in childcare.

Still, the time parents are actively providing care does not reflect the whole spectrum of parental time investments in children. Some childcare is multitasked with other activities. For example, parents fortunate to work remotely may have experienced more flexibility in integrating childcare and housework into their lives by multitasking. But research on the early days of the pandemic suggests that fathers who work remotely safeguard their work time and space (and leisure) from care of and time with children. Although the ATUS data (like most international time use data) does not collect data on multitasking, it does collect data on secondary childcare – time parents are monitoring children’s activities and whereabouts while doing something else. Mothers’ secondary childcare initially increased 47 minutes/day in 2020 but then decreased 22 minutes from 2020-2021. Fathers followed a similar pattern, leading the gender gap in secondary childcare to remain constant during the early pandemic years.

Parents also do some daily activities with children present, such as taking a walk or watching TV while children are present. Mothers’ time with children did not change between 2019 and 2021 – around 6 hours and 40 minutes each day. In contrast, fathers’ time with children increased 30 minutes in 2020 and 13 minutes more by 2021. As a result, the gender gap in time with children narrowed from 2019-2021. The slight decrease in fathers’ time with children in 2021 may result from easing restrictions on public activities and social interactions, with children returning to school and childcare centers and older children spending more time outside their homes with friends.

The ATUS data also suggests the pandemic impacted unpaid work differently depending on parents’ employment circumstances1. Among employed mothers and fathers who worked only at home on the ATUS diary day, mothers spend about 30 minutes more per day than fathers providing physical care – but there is no significant gender gap in developmental care. This holds in 2019, 2020, and 2021 – suggesting the pandemic didn’t disrupt or exacerbate the gender gap in parental childcare. Additionally, fathers who worked at home on ATUS diary day reported more childcare time compared with those who worked outside the home (about 38 minutes more in 2021), and just about as much as non-employed fathers. College educated fathers are more likely to hold jobs that allow remote work and those fathers may have engaged in status safeguarding parenting behaviors during the pandemic.

Turning to housework, fathers’ time in housework increased about 10 minutes/day between 2019 and 2020 before a return to 2019 levels by 2021. Mothers continue to do about an hour more housework per day than fathers. Hence, the pandemic appears not to have led to greater gender equality in housework. Interestingly, though, housework did not increase during the pandemic even among mothers who worked remotely.

What do these findings mean for gender inequality in unpaid work in the future?

There are two possible ways to narrow the gender gap in housework and childcare: 1) decrease women’s time spent in unpaid labor or 2) increase men’s time spent in unpaid labor. Longitudinal data suggest childcare time increased among some parents, such as those who reduced paid work hours or left jobs altogether. About half of mothers’ increased childcare time during the initial phase of the pandemic can be attributed to mothers’ decline in paid work and leaving the labor market altogether. This is not surprising given that the United States only temporarily expanded the family safety net. Pundits and scholars alike believe the possibility of addressing the critical need for federal policies subsidizing childcare facilities and securing a robust care infrastructure is slim in the current political and social conflict. Still, 13 U.S. states and D.C. have passed legislation requiring paid family or parental leave, and 14 U.S. States and D.C. require employers to provide paid sick days. These workplace policies are likely to support mothers’ labor force participation, tamping down increases in mothers time spent providing childcare. Additionally, the absence of paid parental leave in the U.S. and U.K. negatively affected mothers’ mental health during COVID, in contrast to those in countries like Canada and Australia that offered paid leave during COVID.

College educated workers are demanding continued options to work at home and some workplaces have relented to these demands. Some pre-pandemic research suggests that men who work from home share more equally in domestic labor, particularly when their partners are employed fulltime. If greater access to remote work persists, some [privileged] fathers may be more able to achieve their growing desire to spend more time with their children. Still, pre-pandemic research shows that fathers’ paid labor time tends to be protected from routine childcare duties, potentially mitigating substantial changes. And, many workers – particularly low-income and racial/ethnic minority workers, continue to lack access to flexible work policies.

The long historical arc of work on gender inequality in unpaid work offers only one vision for greater gender equality: it requires fathers’ daily time use to become more like mothers, particularly through the investment of fathers in housework and in childcare. Intentional efforts to bring this about at both an individual and societal level are necessary to bring about more lasting shifts toward greater equality in unpaid labor.

1Sayer, Liana C., Kelsey Drotning, and Sarah Flood. “Gender Racial, and Class Disparities in COVID-19 Impacts on Parent’s Work & Family Time.” Paper presented at the June 2022 Work and Family Research Network conference, New York, NY

About the Authors

Liana C. Sayer is Professor of Sociology and Director, Maryland Time Use Lab and Editor, Journal of Marriage and Family. She can be reached at lsayer@umd.edu. You can follow her on Mastodon sciences.social at @lsayer.

Joanna Pepin is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto. You can follow her on Mastodon at https://sciences.social/@CoffeeBaseball.

Childcare Challenges During the Pandemic and Their Impact on Parents and Care Providers

A briefing paper prepared by Liana Christin Landivar, Women’s Bureau, U.S. Department of Labor, and Pilar Gonalons-Pons, University of Pennsylvania for the Council on Contemporary Families online symposium The COVID-19 Pandemic and the Future of Gender Equality (PDF).

*Views expressed are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the U.S. Department of Labor.

In March 2020, as part of states’ initial pandemic response, most childcare centers and virtually all schools closed to in-person operations, impacting a large share of the country’s children and their caregivers. About one-third of childcare centers remained closed a year later. Additionally, over 60 percent of elementary students attended public school districts that only offered fully or partially remote instruction in the Fall of 2020 with reduced in-person operations continuing for up to a year and a half in parts of the country. Unlike other high-income countries, the  weak support for care infrastructure in the U.S. left parents and essential care providers in childcare centers and homes, preschools, and schools unprepared to address the multifaceted challenges posed by the pandemic. This resulted in significant consequences for both parents and providers, and ultimately, for social inequality.

How the lack of care infrastructure impacted parents

Employment swiftly declined among mothers in the first year of the pandemic. Mothers were more likely to leave their jobs and delay re-employment than fathers because they picked up significant and prolonged increases in carework at home, lacking alternative care arrangements for their children. As schools and childcare centers closed, care from friends and family also became more limited because of pandemic-related risks. Employment reductions were particularly large among mothers working in low-wage jobs without workplace flexibilities such as paid leave or telework that could have helped accommodate work and care obligations at home.

The pandemic left a long-lasting imprint on mothers lacking care arrangements during the first year of the pandemic. Mothers who lived in areas with remote public school instruction had prolonged reduced employment, particularly mothers without a college degree. Even three years later, the employment rates of Black mothers and mothers without a college degree had still not returned to pre-pandemic employment levels. Among college graduates, many of whom were able to keep working, the gender wage gap expanded.

Today, parents are still dealing with childcare disruptions, resulting in an increase in work disruptions. A new report shows that in 2022, 3.3% of mothers and 1.5% of fathers reported being absent from work in the past week due to childcare problems. An additional 4.1% of mothers and 3.2% of fathers who regularly work full-time had worked part-time in the past week due to childcare problems. These numbers are higher than prior to the pandemic, with mothers continuing to report more work disruptions due to childcare lapses than fathers.

Increasing childcare prices are also putting pressure on parents, many of whom rely on paid childcare to be able to work. Since the start of the pandemic, childcare prices have risen to cover temporary reduced capacity limits, safety equipment needs, significant worker turnover, and rapidly rising inflation. New data from the Women’s Bureau shows that families were paying between $4,810 per year for school-age children in before/aftercare to $17,171 per year for infants (in 2022 dollars), absorbing between 8 percent and 19 percent of family income per child in paid care. In the past year, childcare prices have risen an additional 7% from a year earlier – outpacing inflation (Figure 1) and putting childcare farther out of reach for lower- and middle-income families.

Figure 1. Consumer Price Index for All Items and Day Care and Preschool: 12 Month Percent Change

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Price Index. Authors’ calculations.

How the pandemic impacted care workers and providers

Care workers and providers were profoundly impacted by the pandemic.

Nearly 16,000 childcare centers went out of business in the first year of the pandemic, representing about 9 percent of childcare centers nationwide. Among providers remaining open, new capacity limits drastically reduced the number of children that could be served. Closures and capacity reductions were especially concentrated among providers serving Asian, Black, and Latino children.

Childcare workers were more than twice as likely to experience job loss and employment reductions than workers in other industries (Figure 2) and saw their earnings decline 50% more than other workers. Childcare employment has lagged behind other sectors in its recovery, with the number of employees per childcare establishment remaining below pre-pandemic levels as of 2023. Though public school teachers earn more than childcare workers, and were largely protected from job loss during the pandemic, they left their jobs for retirement at double the rate of other workers. Even as most schools reopened to in-person instruction in Spring 2021, teachers are continuing to deal with increased mental health and well-being concerns among students, difficulty securing resources and equipment, and lost instructional time as a result of the pandemic, increasing the demands in their jobs.

Figure 2. Percentage Change in Number of Employed Individuals in the US Economy and in Select Childcare-Related Jobs: 2018-2022

Note: The sample includes all working age adults (16-65) and uses sample weights. Percentage change calculated in reference to March 2020. Teachers’ employment levels decline during summer months due to seasonality of employment.
Source: Current Population Survey 2018-2022. Authors’ calculations.

Some of the challenges in rebuilding the educational and childcare sector stem from poor compensation of care workers, and inadequate government funding of care providers resulting in what the U.S. Treasury calls a broken market. Childcare workers are paid among the lowest wages of all occupations in the United States: $13.71 an hour in 2022. As prices and inflation surged in 2021 and wages increased for lower-paid workers, childcare worker compensation became even more inadequate, resulting in greater difficulties attracting a sufficient number of workers to the sector to develop adequate supply. Similarly, the education sector has experienced staffing shortages and teachers are underpaid for their qualifications. Taken together, these factors have led to a slower recovery among care workers and providers than the rest of the economy.

The US Care Infrastructure and the Future of Gender Equality

The COVID-19 pandemic drew unprecedented attention to the fragility of the care infrastructure in this country. Longstanding hesitation to government investment in care infrastructure has resulted in a “system” of disconnected and largely privatized care providers, particularly when it comes to the care for younger children, and unaffordable prices for families. In all, by radically disrupting an already fragile care infrastructure, the pandemic has exacerbated economic inequalities by gender as well as by class and race. Gaps in employment and wages between mothers and fathers grew and the slow recovery of the care sector is disproportionately hurting working class women of color. Care infrastructure is the backbone of the economy. Adequate public investment is necessary to increase stability in employment, reduce disparities in labor supply and childcare access, and achieve a more equitable recovery.

About the Authors

Liana Christin Landivar is a senior researcher at the Women’s Bureau in the U.S. Department of Labor and faculty affiliate at the Maryland Population Research Center. She can be reached at liana.c.landivar@gmail.com.

Pilar Gonalons-Pons is the Alber-Klingelhofer Presidential Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. She can be reached at pgonalon@sas.upenn.edu. You can follow her on Twitter at @pilargonalons.

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