Has lockdown transformed the gender division of household labour? Insights from France using a mixed method

Résumé 0

France was under a “hard” lockdown from the end of March 2020 to the beginning of May 2020. Outings had to remain minimal and most activities outside home were closed; school, day-care facilities and most compagnies included. Parents had to contribute to childcare, doing classroom, homework and extracurricular activities at home, sometimes while working. Our paper aims to understand how domestic and parental chores changed during lockdown and how couples having children handled it. It relies on a mixed method approach, using two studies, one quantitative and one qualitative. “Epidemiology and Living Conditions” (the quantitative one) surveyed 135 000 people, recruited via a random representative sample of people aged 15 and more. In this paper, we focused on people living with a spouse and at least one child under 10. Data on daily life, including daily time use and the division of housework and childcare, were collected over the phone or Internet. The second study followed 18 families having dependent children aged 2 to 16 (with at least one under 10), from various social background and housing conditions. One parent (usually the mother) was interviewed each week by phone or videoconference about everyday life during lockdown. We have based our investigations on the following three hypotheses, built on the first published research on the effects of the pandemic: first, we hypothesize that the concentration of all family activities in a single space has dramatically increased domestic work, and especially parental chores. We then suggest that, despite its scale and the more frequent presence of both spouses in the home, domestic work has not been equally distributed among couples, women usually did more than their husbands. Finally, we assume that certain household configurations have allowed a better division of labour, taking in account the working status during the lockdown, as well as the level of qualification or the degree of equality that previously existed in domestic arrangements. Our presentation will show that the first confinement led to a significant increase in the domestic burden of parents, for both men and women, but did not really reduce the gender gap, and even reinforced the stereotyped division of tasks and the mental work of organizing housework and childcare. It will also demonstrate that, to be fully understood, domestic arrangements must not only be studied through a gender lens, but that this perspective must intersect with elements of a more socio-economic nature.