Who took care of what?
The gender division of unpaid work during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic in France

Marta Pasqualini, Marta Dominguez-Folgueras, Emanuele Ferragina
Olivier Godechot, Ettore Recchi, Mirna Safi

Demographic Research, vol. 46, art. 34, p. 1007-1036
24 May 2022, doi 10.4054/DemRes.2022.46.34
This paper is available in open access

France was one of the first countries implementing lockdown measures to mitigate the spread of COVID-19. Since families spent more time at home, household and care workloads increased significantly. However, existing findings are mixed in terms of whether this situation contributed to a more gender-egalitarian division of unpaid work.

This paper explores the division of domestic work within couples across two different COVID-19 lockdowns and compares them to the out-of-lockdown period in France. We use the theoretical lenses of time availability, relative resources, and ‘doing gender’ to make sense of these changes.

The longitudinal analyses rely on an original panel study we collected in France between April 2020 and April 2021.We employ the different types of restrictions to mobility and social life imposed during the first year of the pandemic as a contextual background, within which we measure the main drivers of change in the division of unpaid work within couples. We use individual fixed effect regression models to estimate changes in men’s share of unpaid work by time, changes in work conditions, partners’ educational gaps, and types of domestic tasks.

Another data and analysis are available within the CoCo Project (Coping with Covid-19: Social distancing, cohesion and inequality in 2020 France) - Data produced by the CDSP via the ELIPSS Panel (8 waves) are described in the Sciences Po data repository: https://data.sciencespo.fr/dataverse/elipss