The gender division of unpaid care work throughout the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany

DOI

The COVID-19 pandemic and related closures of day care centres and schools significantly increased the amount of care work done by parents. There has been much speculation over whether the pandemic increased or decreased gender equality in parental care work. Based on representative data for Germany from spring 2020 and winter 2021 we present an empirical analysis that shows that although gender inequality in the division of care work increased to some extent in the beginning of the pandemic, it returned to the pre-pandemic level in the second lockdown almost nine months later. These results suggest that the COVID-19 pandemic neither aggravated nor lessened inequality in the division of unpaid care work among mothers and fathers in any persistent way in Germany.

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.15456/ger.2022196.132215
Metadata Access https://www.da-ra.de/oaip/oai?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=oai_dc&identifier=oai:oai.da-ra.de:774105
Provenance
Creator Jessen, Jonas; Spiess, Katharina; Waights, Sevrin; Wrohlich, Katharina
Publisher ZBW - Leibniz Informationszentrum Wirtschaft
Publication Year 2022
Rights Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC-BY); Download
OpenAccess true
Contact ZBW - Leibniz Informationszentrum Wirtschaft
Representation
Language English
Resource Type Collection
Discipline Economics; Social and Behavioural Sciences