How Couples Split Chores and Caretaking During COVID

It is hard to believe that only a few years ago many of us were sheltering at home for months, even years, on end. Life was turned upside down and inside out.

Daycare centers shuttered, schools closed, restaurants closed, and many other workplaces closed as well. We were divided into those of us sheltering in place and “essential” workers who braved death simply by going to their jobs.

We lived through this seriously dramatic and traumatic event. But did we learn anything from it? It’s too early to know for sure, but the first research projects are beginning to provide some clues.

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As Editor of Gender & Society, in 2021 I published a special issue on “The Gendered Impacts of COVID-19.” We published articles that suggested the effects of the crises were not equally distributed, but rather that women with caregiving responsibilities were bearing the brunt of the pandemic both in the U.S. and across the globe.

Other research showed the devastating impact of COVID on gender equality. For example, mothers with young children reduced their work hours four to five times more than did fathers.

Jessica Calarco’s new book Holding it Together argues that in the United States, we have come to rely on women as our safety net, because a real safety net does not exist to catch families that need help to survive. And despite large numbers of men working remotely and being home during the day—some for the first time in their adult lives—many did not quickly or fully become responsible equal partners as husbands or fathers by handling the increased domestic labor that the lockdown created. For most heterosexual parents, women took the brunt of the burden that COVID dumped on families.

But not all is grim. Many women went back to work the moment daycare centers and schools opened once again. We learned, through experience, that many jobs can be re-designed with more flexibility for employees, with remote and hybrid options—and we know parents think this increases the quality of their lives tremendously.

During the pandemic, my colleagues Kathleen Gerson, Jennifer Glass, and Jerry Jacobs read the polls, even helped to create one of them, and found the dire predictions about women being pushed out of the labor force and the burden of homeschooling falling on mothers to be alarming. We wondered how parents, both mothers and fathers, were experiencing their day-to-day lives beyond the statistical trends.

So we designed a research project to try to understand the experiences of caregivers during COVID. We recruited graduate students from each of our universities and began interviewing parents from across the country, asking them to reflect deeply on the changes occurring in their lives.

Our sample was drawn from respondents who were part of a nationally representative National Opinion Research Center (NORC) panel. For the research discussed here, our subsample consists of 49 women and 32 men, ranging from 23 to 59 years of age. Everyone was married or cohabiting with a partner who also worked full-time in the labor force. They came from every region of the country.

While we found many of the same trends as others—more women taking on more of the household tasks than their partners—we also have some good news to report. Our new article, authored by Michelle Cera, Golda Kaplan, Kathleen Gerson, and myself has recently been published in the journal Social Sciences.

In our sample, as in others, most couples remained in their habitual patterns even when the context changed, with children at and often their own work, now at home all day. The couples that had been egalitarian before the pandemic remained so.

Most of the mothers in our sample did more than their fair share of housework and parenting. Some were very angry about it. Others sounded resigned.

But that is not the whole story. The diversity of family processes often gets lost in reporting the majority trend. While knowing the most common response to any event is important, knowing the variety of responses is equally so.

We found that some heterosexual couples did use the flexibility of remote or hybrid work during the pandemic to become more egalitarian partners, with fathers stepping up to the plate. Of course, this was the minority. But what makes their unusual choice possible?

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Our qualitative interviews allowed us to explore what made these couples different from the norm. And the answer was clear: These were couples who already held feminist beliefs, and wanted to share equally the responsibility of earning a living and caring for their children.

But in the pre-pandemic era, their jobs made that very difficult. The husband often worked longer hours and earned more money, so his work had to be prioritized. When both partners had the flexibility to do their work at least partly from home, they could put their values into practice.

In one of my co-author's (Kathleen Gerson) previous books, The Unfinished Revolution, she suggests that many Americans today want to have egalitarian marriages but that economic and social forces, like their workplaces, make that very hard. The pandemic made it possible for some of them to walk the walk, as well as talk the talk.

What This Means for Couples Going Forward

What lessons should we take from the natural experiment of sheltering in place?

If couples did not hold egalitarian values before the pandemic hit, the new workplace flexibility meant that heterosexual women usually shouldered the extra burden of domestic work that comes with everyone at home together—for some families, all day every day, learning and working online. In contrast, for those couples who had egalitarian beliefs but were stymied by inflexible workplace policies from living their own values, the pandemic experience allowed them to put into practice what they already believed, that men should be equal domestic partners at home.

There is a vital lesson for use as a society here, for social policy in the post-COVID era. Changing workplace rules don’t necessarily promote gender equality at home. Without feminist values, workplace structure has minimal influence on gender equality in families.

Nor are values alone enough. For gender equality to be possible, we both need workplace policies that allow flexibility for workers who are wage earners and involved parents and the desire of those workers to have egalitarian marriages. Only when those who are committed to gender equality are provided by workplace flexibility and social policies that support families can heterosexual couples reach their own goal of equality in marriage.