After the first transition to parenthood, most couples adopt a gendered labor division, where mothers become main caregivers and fathers breadwinners of the family. By comparing two distinct language regions within one country, the present article explores how parents’ gendered labor division comes into existence and what role gendered culture and social policy play. The analysis draws on in-depth interviews with 23 German speaking and 73 French speaking participants from Switzerland. The results reveal that French speaking women and men presume an egalitarian labor division as parents. In German speaking regions, however, participants anticipate that mothers will become the main caregivers and fathers the breadwinners. It is shown that the labor market structure, which is in line with the male breadwinner norm, contributes to men’s full-time employment, whereas mothers’ labor market insertion is influenced by the acceptance of non-parental childcare and to a lesser extent by the offer of childcare facilities. Further, mothers experience more time conflicts than fathers, and the less mothers’ paid work is accepted, the more they suffer from feelings of guilt when being employed.

When new parents divide paid and unpaid work, they may not benefit financially from their decisions. New mothers are more likely than new fathers to reduce paid working hours, even if they contribute as much or more to family income. To determine why they make economically inefficient decisions when they divide their labor, this study traces new parents’ financial decision-making. The study is based on 133 in-depth interviews with 54 parents (27 couples) residing in French-speaking Switzerland. Parents were interviewed once before and once or twice during the first 2 years after the birth of their first child. The study focuses on two financial decisions parents must make: about division of working hours and type of childcare. Parents did not calculate the real costs of their labor division; gender norms shaped their cost estimates. They underestimated costs consistent with norms that defined mothers as caregivers and fathers as providers and overestimated costs when fathers acted as caregivers and mothers acted as providers. Even when parents voiced opposition to gender norms, they rationalized gendered labor division as economically efficient and their decisions conformed to those norms. Because real costs of labor division deviated from estimated costs, researchers who conduct studies on parents’ financial decisions should account for that discrepancy.

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