Council on Contemporary Families

Family Caregiving (for Adults, Children, and Disabilities)

Between A Rock and A Hard Place: Lessons From The Covid-19 Pandemic About Health Concerns And US Mothers’ Employment

A briefing paper prepared for the Council on Contemporary Families by Daniel L. Carlson, Associate Professor, Department of Family and Consumer Studies, University of Utah, Priya Fielding-Singh, Assistant Professor, Department of Family and Consumer Studies, University of Utah, Richard Petts, Professor, Department of Sociology, Ball State University, and Kristi Williams, Professor, Department of Sociology, The Ohio State University.

It is widely known that mothers’ employment has suffered most during the COVID-19 pandemic. To date, however, most discussions about the causes of the pandemic-induced “she-session” have focused on the impact of school closures and lack of child care. Yet, none of those factors explains the slow initial recovery of women’s employment after businesses and school reopened following lockdowns in Spring 2020 and, most recently, a striking decline in women’s labor force participation in Fall 2022 after it had finally rebounded to near pre-pandemic levels. This recent decline occurred in spite of low unemployment, high demand for labor, increased bargaining power for workers, and new concerns to increase family income because of inflation. 

Our new study recently published in Socius reveals a largely overlooked factor driving mothers’ employment after initial COVID lockdowns – their concerns for public health.

Using data from the Study on Parents’ Divisions of Labor During COVID-19 (SPDLC) on 263 partnered US mothers who were employed prior to the pandemic, we examined how mothers’ concerns about COVID (whether they worried that someone they know will contract COVID) shaped their labor force participation in the Fall of 2020. Indeed, polls in 2020 showed that Americans were markedly concerned about contracting and spreading COVID in Fall 2020. Three-quarters of mothers polled in one survey worried that their child or someone in their family would fall ill if their child returned to in-person school. Results from our study echoed these findings. More than three-quarters of mothers in the SPDLC agreed or strongly agreed that they worried that someone they know would contract COVID. Importantly, mothers who were more worried about COVID were less likely to be employed, and among those that were still employed, worked fewer hours per week.

Our aim was to examine not only whether – but also why – mothers’ COVID concerns affected their employment and paid work hours. We examined three possible pathways through which mothers’ COVID concerns could have impacted their labor force participation: 1) the frequency of children’s attendance of in-person school/childcare, 2) mothers’ remote work, and 3) mothers’ stress.

One of the primary reasons worried mothers worked less was because their concerns about COVID were associated with children spending more time at home and less time at school or daycare. Simply put: the more time children spent at home, the less likely mothers were to be employed. Mothers’ COVID concerns help us understand not only their delay in returning to the labor force, but also why despite substantial efforts to reopen schools across the U.S. in Fall 2020 so many children continued to learn remotely.

Among mothers who were still employed in Fall 2020, their concerns about COVID were associated with fewer work hours not only because these concerns led to more time with children at home, but also because keeping children home resulted in more stress for mothers. Working remotely was associated with fewer paid work hours for mothers. While the flexibility that remote work seemingly provides is often assumed to be a means of managing work-family conflict for mothers, it may actually exacerbate gender inequalities in families. Within the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, working remotely in response to keeping children home to reduce COVID exposure appears to have constrained mothers’ abilities to work.

Though our study focused on Fall 2020, its findings have important implications for our broader understanding of mothers’ employment, particularly in regards to recent declines in the face of the “tripledemic” of flu, RSV, and COVID cases in Fall 2022/Winter 2023. Our study suggests that the sudden downturn in women’s employment in Fall 2022 despite what had been a steady increase in labor force participation since 2021, is due at least in part to processes similar to those observed in Fall 2020.

Every fall, Americans are warned about the upcoming cold and flu season. Now with COVID becoming seemingly endemic, and seasonal threats of surges in other diseases like RSV and strep throat, these warnings have become particularly dire. Alongside risks to families’ and children’s health, surges in serious transmittable disease, which are becoming more frequent post-COVID, pose a threat to gender equality. Because of a lack of widespread paid sick leave, rising rates of infectious diseases can make it difficult for parents – and especially mothers – to continue working. Whether it’s strategizing ways to keep kids from getting sick or caring for them when they fall ill, mothers are generally the family health manager and the parent to cut back on work hours to care for kids at home when illness strikes.

As long as COVID and other infectious disease transmission mitigation is largely dependent upon vaccines and antibiotics rather than other public health measures (masking, paid sick leave, etc.), mothers will remain less likely to make a full return to the labor force due to legitimate concerns about their children’s and family’s members health and safety or will see wild seasonal fluctuations in employment that may negatively affect their careers and job prospects. Indeed, approximately 3 in 5 Americans remain concerned about coronavirus and the ‘tripledemic’ further increased fears of illness among parents. Though mothers’ labor force participation appears to have once again recovered from its dip at the end of 2022, if we fail to address mothers’ concerns about COVID and other infectious diseases as they arise, not only is it likely that mothers’ employment will continue to oscillate wildly during periods of high transmission but current and future pandemics are likely to also continue to dampen mothers’ employment and have substantial consequences for gender equality.

April 20, 2023

Mine and Yours, or Ours: Are All Egalitarian Relationships Equal?

A briefing paper prepared for the Council on Contemporary Families by Daniel L. Carlson, Associate Professor, Department of Family and Consumer Studies, University of Utah

April 25, 2022

Which marriages and relationships are happiest? And is it the same for men and women? These questions have come to the forefront of conversations about intimate partnerships in recent decades as the roles of men and women in families have shifted dramatically.

In 1960, seventy percent of married parent households consisted of a male income-earner and a female homemaker.  At the time, family experts believed that this was not only the most efficient way to organize society but the best predictor of marital stability and happiness. Nobel prize-winning economist Gary Becker argued that labor specialization among heterosexual partners maximized the product of men’s and women’s labor, making for greater efficiency and leading to more satisfying and stable partnerships.                

For several decades, research seemed to support Becker’s suppositions. Couples with a “traditional” division of household labor reported higher marital and sexual satisfaction than couples who shared housework, and earnings equality in intimate partnerships actually raised the risk of relationship dissolution.

Today, “breadwinner-homemaker” families constitute less than one-third of married parent families, while 60 percent of families are headed by dual earners. Gender responsibilities for paid work have become more evenly divided, and so have responsibilities for unpaid domestic work, though to a much lesser extent. On average, married mothers do half as much routine housework as they did in 1965 (16 hours vs. 32 hours per week) while married fathers do twice as much (5 hours vs. 2 hours). Among dual-earning couples, mothers do 13.5 hours of housework, compared to 9.5 hours for fathers.       

Contrary to the expectations of scholars such as Becker, the decline in marital specialization has not hurt marriages.  As of the 1990s, the increased risk of divorce for couples where wives earn as much or more than their husbands has disappeared.  Additionally, couples who share childcare responsibilities report greater relationship and sexual satisfaction than couples where mothers are solely responsible for childcare. Since the 1990s, sexual intimacy among those who share housework equally has increased, whereas among couples where female partners do the majority of housework it has decreased. 

Despite the seemingly positive impact of egalitarian relationships, movement in this direction has stalled in the past couple of decades. Although the gendered division of labor in families is much more equal than it was in the 1960s, there has been little change in women’s labor force participation or men’s housework in the last three decades.  The COVID-19 pandemic threatened to reverse the progress of the gender revolution by thrusting domestic labor back into homes. Though fathers increased their domestic labor during the early days of the pandemic, so too did mothers, and the loss of in-person school and daycare was associated with significant decreases in mothers’ labor force participation.

Some people suggest that we have reached an upper limit to the benefits of equal sharing, beyond which men in particular are not willing to go without relationship quality suffering. Others argue that relationships would be happier if work policies and social norms encouraged more couples to share the housework as evenly as they now share income-earning.

Resolving this question is not as easy as it might seem. The research is fairly consistent in demonstrating that women are happier in relationships where routine housework responsibilities (i.e., cooking, cleaning, laundry, dishes, and shopping) are shared equally (see here, here, here, and here). But the findings are more mixed when it comes to men. Although some research finds that men report the greatest relationship satisfaction in couples where routine housework is shared equally (here, here, and here), others find that men are happiest in arrangements where they have no responsibilities for routine housework (here, here, here, here, and here). Still, other studies find no difference in men’s happiness between arrangements where they do no housework and those where they share it equally (here, here, here, here, and here).

These contradictory findings on the relationship between egalitarian housework and relationship satisfaction may stem from the fact that the way housework is currently measured doesn’t capture variations in how partners craft their housework arrangements. Conventional measures of housework simply calculate each partner’s total time spent on all tasks. Yet “housework” is actually an amalgamation of several distinct tasks. Because of this, partners can accomplish an equal division of tasks in many different ways. Some egalitarian couples may divide tasks between partners, with each partner doing all of some tasks and none of the tasks done by the other. Others may share equally in the completion of all tasks. For instance, each partner may do the laundry, the cooking, and the cleaning half of the time.  A fundamental question therefore is how do couples, egalitarian couples especially, actually construct their housework arrangements? And does this matter for relationship satisfaction?

In a forthcoming study in the journal Sex Roles, I use data from two nationally representative surveys of married and cohabiting US adults to examine the degree to which partners share in the completion of routine housework tasks and how men’s and women’s relationship quality (feelings of fairness; satisfaction with housework arrangements; overall relationship satisfaction) varies by the number of routine housework tasks they both take equal responsibility for versus the number that they divvy up, with each focusing on a different set of tasks.

My findings suggest that when it comes to analyzing the impact of the division of labor on people’s satisfaction, we need to do more than count the total time or overall proportion that each partner puts into housework. There is significant variation in the extent to which couples, especially those in egalitarian arrangements, share or divide up tasks.  As one might expect, there is little sharing in traditional housework arrangements (i.e., where men do less than 40% of housework). In such households, even when men do take on some of the routine tasks, 75 to 85 percent of partners equally share no tasks or only one. There is much more variation in task-sharing in egalitarian households (i.e., where women and men do roughly equal amounts of the housework, varying between 40 and 60 percent). Only 20 to 30 percent of egalitarian partners equally share no tasks or only one task with each other, while upwards of 40 percent equally share all or nearly all tasks.

As it turns out, the number of equally shared tasks matters a great deal for both men’s and women’s relationship quality.  Indeed, among recent cohorts, there is evidence to suggest that it matters as much if not more than each partner’s overall proportion of housework. For both men and women, the number of equally shared tasks is associated with a greater likelihood of A) feeling their relationship is fair to both partners, B) feeling satisfied with their own housework arrangement, and C) feeling satisfied with the relationship overall.

This pattern explains some of the contradictory research findings from earlier studies. Using the same data, I find that increases in men’s proportion of overall housework is positively associated with women’s reports of relationship quality, but negatively associated with men’s reports. From this, one could conclude that men feel less satisfied in equal domestic arrangements compared to traditional arrangements. But looking at the association of men’s satisfaction with the number of equally shared tasks, one could conclude that equality is associated with greater relationship satisfaction for men.

Indeed, when considering both the number of tasks that partners share and the proportion of overall housework each partner does, it appears that satisfaction in egalitarian relationships compared to traditional relationships depends on the number of tasks that the couple shares. Men in traditional arrangements who do no housework are significantly more satisfied with their relationships than men in egalitarian arrangements who equally share only two or fewer tasks. But egalitarian men who equally share at least three tasks with their partner are as fully satisfied with their relationships and housework arrangements as men who do no housework at all.

Women’s responses also confirm that not all egalitarian arrangements are created equal. Compared to women in traditional arrangements, women in egalitarian arrangements who equally share at least one task are significantly more satisfied with their relationships. However, women who divide housework equally with their male partners but do not equally share any tasks are no more satisfied than women who do all of the housework.

My findings suggest that the most mutually beneficial housework arrangement for the dyadic relationship is one where all tasks are shared equally.  Men may be equally satisfied doing no housework or sharing all or most tasks equally, but since women’s highest satisfaction is when all or most tasks are shared, the route to a happy relationship appears to lie in sharing.

Why might sharing the tasks equally create more satisfaction than dividing the tasks so that each partner specializes in a different set of tasks?  One likely answer is that tasks vary in how onerous or enjoyable people find them to be – think doing the laundry or cleaning the bathroom vs cooking – and the unpleasant ones are less likely to be shared than other more enjoyable ones. As such, egalitarian partners who divide up tasks run the risk of delegating particularly onerous tasks to just one person, lowering feelings of fairness and relationship satisfaction. Even when couples try to divide the onerous tasks equally, it is hard for someone to assess whether their partner’s contribution is the same as their own when doing different things at different times. Sharing all tasks equally eliminates these sources of resentment or misunderstanding, ensuring that each partner feels their arrangement is equitable and satisfying.

Acknowledgment

The author would like to thank the staff at CCF for their assistance with the production of this article and Stephanie Coontz for her helpful comments in drafting this brief.

For More Information, Please Contact:

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

Links

Brief report: https://sites.utexas.edu/contemporaryfamilies/2022/04/25/egalitarian-relationships-brief-report/
Press release: https://sites.utexas.edu/contemporaryfamilies/2022/04/25/egalitarian-relationships-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. 

April 25, 2022

Mothers Are the Primary Earners in Growing Numbers of Families with Children

A summary of forthcoming research prepared for the Council on Contemporary Families by Jennifer Glass, R. Kelly Raley (UT, Austin), and Joanna Pepin (Univ. at Buffalo, SUNY)

November 2, 2021

About 70% of U.S. moms can expect to be primary financial providers before their children turn 18.

In a substantial number of families with children, mothers, whether single or partnered, are now the primary breadwinner. More than 40 percent of American mothers solely or primarily support their minor children through their own earnings in any given year. For most of the 20th century, except in wartime, says historian Stephanie Coontz, women who were the primary source of their children’s income were generally unmarried, divorced, or widowed. But for the past two decades, the most rapid growth in breadwinning mothers has been among partnered women.  As late as 2000, only 15 percent of primary-earning mothers were married. But by 2017, married women accounted for almost 40 percent of mothers whose earnings were the primary support for their families.[1]

These figures actually understate the chance that a mother will at some point be the primary economic support for her children, since they represent only a static cross-section of families in any one year. The number of years mothers primarily rely on their own earnings to support their children provides a better picture of children’s financial dependence on moms. In a study to be released this month in the peer-reviewed journal Socius, “Children’s Financial Dependence on Mothers: Propensity and Duration,” we use recent data from the Census Bureau’s 2014-2017 Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) to estimate a mother’s chance of ever being the family breadwinner over her first 18 years of motherhood, as well as the average duration of a mother’s role as primary household earner. We conservatively define breadwinning as earning at least 60 percent of her household’s earnings in the previous year.

We find that in the 18 years following the birth of their first child, about 70 percent of American mothers can expect to be the primary breadwinner in their household for at least one year. The average time such mothers can expect to spend as primary breadwinner is nearly 6 years.  

The experience of being the family’s primary breadwinner occurs across all educational levels. We find that 62 percent of mothers without a high school diploma will support their households at some time during the first 18 years of motherhood, a figure that rises to 67 percent among those with a high school diploma. About 71 percent of mothers who are college graduates will at some point bring in more than 60 percent of household earnings, and a whopping 76 percent of mothers who attend college but do not obtain a degree will serve as primary breadwinners for their household for some period of time. These mothers also average a longer duration as primary breadwinners. Mothers with “some college” but no degree are not a small part of the population. Thirty percent of all mothers fall into this category.

Our findings demonstrate that many American children already depend primarily on their mothers’ earnings for their well-being, and that most will likely do so at some point in their childhood. The COVID-19 pandemic reveals the tremendous risks to children when mothers cannot earn money for their families because they do not have access to childcare and/or paid caregiving leave. In large part because of the lack of such supports, mothers have experienced job losses at over twice the rate of fathers in this crisis. For many families the economic consequences of mothers’ COVID-19 related employment interruptions will last well into the future, and research shows that even just a few years of economic deprivation or insecurity pose long-term risks to children.  It is time for policy-makers and social planners to recognize the near ubiquity of children’s reliance on their mothers’ earnings across all sections of the population.

[1] Author calculations based on the 1990-2000 Censuses and 2010-2017 American Community Surveys

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The study discussed in this briefing paper is forthcoming in Socius, the open-access journal of the American Sociological Association. I would like to recognize my co-authors R. Kelly Raley, and Joanna Pepin. We are also greatly appreciative of Stephanie Coontz’ feedback and editorial assistance on this briefing paper.

FOR MORE INFORMATION, PLEASE CONTACT:

Jennifer Glass, Ph.D.
Centennial Commission Professor of Sociology
University of Texas, Austin
jennifer-glass@utexas.edu
(319) 621-6304

R. Kelly Raley, Ph.D.
Christie and Stanley E. Adams, Jr. Centennial Professor of Sociology
University of Texas, Austin
kelly.raley@austin.utexas.edu
(512) 232-6333

Joanna Pepin
Assistant Professor of Sociology
Univ. at Buffalo, SUNY
jpepin@buffalo.edu
(716) 645-2417

ABOUT CCF

The Council on Contemporary Families is a non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to providing the press and public with the latest research and best-practice findings about American families. Founded in 1996 and based at the University of Texas at Austin, the Council’s mission is to enhance the national understanding of how and why contemporary families are changing, what needs and challenges they face, and how these needs can best be met. For more information, please contact Stephanie Coontz, Director of Research and Public Education for the Council, at coontzs@msn.com or (360) 556-9223

“The Tool We Have”: Why Child Protective Services Investigates So Many Families and How Even Good Intentions Backfire

“The Tool We Have”: Why Child Protective Services Investigates So Many Families and How Even Good Intentions Backfire
A briefing paper prepared by Kelley Fong (Georgia Institute of Technology) for the Council on Contemporary Families.

August 11, 2020

In recent months, conversations around the role of the police have drawn mainstream attention to what contemporary policing actually encompasses. Responding to violent crime constitutes only a small share of police work; instead, we often call on armed officers to address homelessness, mental illness, addiction, and other social adversities. Even when these encounters do not lead to arrest or physical violence, ubiquitous policing in marginalized communities, especially Black communities, heightens experiences of exclusion, injustice, and precarity.

In a new study, I trace how another, parallel institution comes to loom large in marginalized communities: Child Protective Services (CPS). 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 children, Black children, and Native American children. A staggering one in three children can expect a CPS investigation at some point during childhood.

To understand why CPS encounters are so commonplace, especially for marginalized families, I observed CPS investigations in Connecticut and interviewed approximately 100 key participants on these cases: professionals reporting suspected child maltreatment, frontline investigators, and investigated mothers. My research shows 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. As with the police, this expansive reliance on authorities with coercive power fosters fear and mistrust even when CPS does not find sufficient evidence to confirm maltreatment.

Contrary to media coverage focused on a few exceptional cases of horrific maltreatment, CPS’s broad reach does not imply millions of malevolent parents are willfully or seriously abusing their children. The situations drawing CPS’s attention typically involve adversities such as domestic violence, substance misuse, homelessness, and mental health needs, often among families experiencing material hardship and systemic racism. As I learned, the educational, medical, law enforcement, and other professionals who initiate two-thirds of CPS reports usually do not think the children they report are in grave danger. And CPS investigators agree. Nationwide, the vast majority of reports (over 80 percent) are deemed unfounded by CPS.

But nor does widespread CPS reporting represent a deluge of false reports from bureaucrats concerned about liability given legal mandates, or, conversely, eager to see children taken from “bad” parents. Overwhelmingly, teachers, nurses, police officers, and other service professionals say they would have reported their most recent case even if not legally required to do so. But usually, they do not want or expect CPS to remove children from the home. Instead, they call CPS in the hope of resolving a key dilemma they face: They want to help families but have limited time, resources, and roles to do so as they believe necessary. Thus, they turn families over to an agency they hope can intervene with families in ways they cannot. At a women’s services center, a staff member explained that “this is the tool that we have” to ensure children’s needs are met. These purportedly benevolent intentions expand the reach of CPS, as reporting professionals call on CPS not primarily to identify children in need of foster care, but to rehabilitate families broadly.

  • Reporting professionals almost always want CPS to provide supportive services, reasoning that CPS has more information about available and appropriate services. For example, in one case, a police officer responded to an incident of domestic violence. “I don’t think that it’s a situation where the kids need to be removed from the house,” he said. Instead, he hoped CPS could assess the family’s needs and perhaps refer them to counseling, interventions he saw as beyond his role and knowledge.
  • Yet reporting professionals also call on CPS’s coercive authority, framing the agency’s power as useful in pressuring parents to accept voluntary services or adjust their behavior in ways reporters believe will improve conditions for children. Another case involved a school struggling to manage a child’s behavioral outbursts. The parents had resisted the school’s desired intervention and the child also mentioned his father hitting him on the head. The school social worker hoped the parents would be more receptive to advice and service referrals coming from CPS. As she reasoned, when CPS refers, “parents either hear it differently or out of nervousness and fear of what if I don’t accept this service. Not that that’s the greatest way to get people involved, but if you get them involved, then hopefully the outcome is beneficial.”
  • Embracing CPS reporting as a means of rehabilitating families disproportionately channels marginalized families to CPS. Race and class biases shape which families reporting professionals believe need supervision and correction. A daycare director, for example, described “red flags” that might make her more likely to turn to CPS: “Your quick, first red flag would be a lower-income family. Where they live has a lot to do with it too.” Moreover, given underinvestment in communities of color and poor communities, systems serving these families face resource constraints that may increase reliance on CPS. In one case, a major provider of mental health services for low-income Black and Latinx families reported a Latina mother who did not follow through with treatment recommendations after her daughter’s suicide attempt. The therapist said she “didn’t want to throw CPS at” the mother, but with her high caseload, she felt she could not keep following up to ensure the daughter received recommended services. “Because I’m seeing so many families,” she said, “things get lost and they fall through the cracks… [so it’s] gotta go to the big guys.”

But professionals’ wide-ranging concerns about families are often ill-suited to the intervention CPS offers.

  • Frontline investigators point out that responding effectively to many of the families coming to their attention does not require the coercive authority that CPS can exert. CPS is uniquely empowered to identify candidates for legal intervention and child removal. But with children’s basic safety typically not at issue, investigators question the need for a child protection-specific response, recognizing that any assistance they might be able to offer could be provided by others instead. As one investigator noted, reporting professionals could make referrals or educate families themselves, but “they just pick up the phone and call us,” straining his caseload and subjecting families to unnecessary surveillance: “Once you call us, it’s a whole different ballgame… We come in and we delve into everything.”
  • CPS investigators, like reporting professionals, are often unable to address families’ persistent needs. “I know I’m supposed to be a miracle worker, but sometimes there’s nothing we can do,” lamented another investigator. For example, the agency can refer to therapeutic services, but cannot address the chronic material needs at the root of many reports. On one case, involving a family’s housing conditions, the investigator wondered aloud, “What am I supposed to really do? I don’t see the kids being neglected.” She wanted to help the family, but CPS could not provide ongoing rental assistance. “The sad part is there’s nothing we can do in the sense that we don’t have housing,” she reflected.

Upon receiving reports, CPS investigators conduct multiple home visits and question families on numerous aspects of their personal lives. Investigators try to connect families with social services, but, like police, these efforts are often undermined by the agency’s coercive authority. Faced with the possibility of family separation, parents react with fear, mistrust, or resentment, straining their relationships with critical service providers.

  • CPS investigations foster substantial anxiety among investigated families. Although reporting professionals and investigators rarely expect children will be removed, 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, even when parents ultimately view CPS investigators positively. For example, one mother, reported to CPS for using marijuana during pregnancy, hesitated to speak openly with healthcare providers afterwards, potentially precluding her from accessing needed support. 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.”

Thus, 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. To work towards a more effective and just response, we can, first, revise mandated reporter trainings and CPS hotline screening to discourage and remove routes for professionals to wield CPS as a tool of disciplinary control. Second, akin to models that replace police with unarmed, support-oriented crisis response teams, we might devise an alternative entity for reporting professionals to obtain assistance for families, perhaps one that can refer families to a range of services based on the needs they identify.

Any alternative must provide truly voluntary assistance and advocacy, offered without threats of punishment. Recent reforms seeking to orient CPS more around service delivery, such as “differential response” systems and child maltreatment prevention services, remain tethered to the agency’s inherent coercive authority. But effectively supporting child and family welfare requires investments outside coercive systems—investments that shift power and resources to affected communities. Research is clear that broad-scale anti-poverty policies, such as minimum wage increases, the Earned Income Tax Credit, childcare subsidies, and child support pass-throughs, reduce child maltreatment risk and CPS intervention. Families navigating the U.S.’s weak labor market supports, stingy welfare state, and persistent and pervasive racism do not need intrusive and apprehension-inducing inquiries into their parenting; they need equitably distributed material resources as well as the political power to ensure public policy responsive to their needs.

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/

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.

The Council helps keep journalists informed of notable work on family-related issues via the CCF Network. To join the CCF Network, or for further media assistance, please contact Stephanie Coontz, Director of Research and Public Education, at coontzs@msn.com, cell 360-556-9223.

August 11, 2020

Before and during COVID-19: Telecommuting, Work-Family Conflict, and Gender Equality

Before and During COVID-19: Telecommuting, Work-Family Conflict, and Gender Equality
A briefing paper prepared by Thomas Lyttelton (Yale Sociology), Emma Zang (Yale Sociology), and Kelly Musick (Cornell Policy Analysis and Management) for the Council on Contemporary Families.

August 4, 2020

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.

 

Figure 1: Gender Gaps in Household Labor by Work Location among Ever-Telecommuters

 

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).

 

Figure 2: Subjective Well-Being During COVID-19 by Gender and Work Location

 

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.

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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.

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FOR MORE INFORMATION, PLEASE CONTACT:
Thomas Lyttelton / PhD candidate / Yale Sociology / thomas.lyttelton@yale.edu / (203) 606-8047.
Emma Zang / Assistant Professor / Yale Sociology / emma.zang@yale.edu / (919) 536-9621.
Kelly Musick / Professor and Chair / Cornell Policy Analysis and Management / 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/

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

August 4, 2020

 

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