“In this together”? Gender inequality associated with home‐working couples during the first COVID lockdown

Abstract

The first lockdown, conferred upon us by the COVID‐19 outbreak in March 2020, created a unique, 3‐month‐long, laboratory‐like situation that made gender relations and women's work especially relevant for social research. Full‐time employed parents who switched to working from home were in a unique position to renegotiate the division of housework, childcare, or the management of school‐related tasks. This paper explores what happened to the gendered division of unpaid work and what factors explain the (failed) renegotiation between full‐time working parents. To explore this issue, we interviewed 52 Hungarian‐speaking mothers in two countries, Hungary and Romania, who were living in heterosexual dual‐earner families with children under the age of 14, and who were working full‐time. Results show that, despite the unusual situation, the usual pattern of the division of unpaid work was sustained by most parents. Even though they were unhappy and sometimes overwhelmed with their workload, most mothers did not mind the division of care duties. Research findings deliver evidence that mothers' lack of willingness and ability to renegotiate the division of unpaid labor in the household was determined both from “inside” and “outside” households. The gendered nature of care work and intensive parenting and mothers' position in the labor market, including the flexibility of their employment, are two sets of mutually interwoven factors that contributed to women's lack of willingness to challenge the unequal division of reproductive work.

Homeworking and Division of Domestic Work: the Role of Gender Role Attitudes in Germany

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“How can you really step up?”: The dad-double-bind grounded theory of fathering in the United States during COVID-19.

“…Despite the increased time spent together, families faced a unique set of challenges during this period. Daily routines were interrupted, and the boundaries between public and private spheres blurred through the adoption of work-from-home practices, causing numerous families to grapple with the challenge of adapting to the profound alterations within their family system (Nagy et al, 2023).…”

Persistent pandemic: The unequal impact of COVID labor on early career academics

“…This autoethnographic vignette vividly illustrates the extent of stress induced by the lockdown, laying bare the disruptions it caused in the delicate balance between work and family life. It describes the type of tasks that emerged at the onset of the pandemic and the first lockdowns, including the spatial and temporal reorganization of productive and reproductive labor.The transfer of childcare responsibility from collective structures or private individuals to parents during lockdowns has burdened working parents with a simultaneous "double shift": caring for children while fulfilling work obligations without any opportunity for respite between these demanding tasks(André & van der Zwan, 2022;Bühler et al, 2021;Craig & Churchill, 2021;Czymara et al, 2021;Nagy et al, 2023;Refle et al, 2020;Steinmetz et al, 2022).…”