Sharing the tasks, what the surveys measure
The gap between mothers and fathers is narrowing slowly, but not in the way one imagines. The composition of tasks changes faster than their volume.
Two distinct gaps
Time use surveys distinguish domestic work, home upkeep, shopping, meals, from parental work, care, accompanying, play. The two gaps between women and men have not moved at the same pace.
The gap in parental work has narrowed faster, in several countries, than the gap in domestic work. The second is the more stable of the two, and the one surveys measure best. That asymmetry often surprises, because time spent with children is readily presented as the area most resistant to change. The long series rather show the opposite, without any consensus on the reason for that difference in pace.
The nature of the tasks
Studies coding tasks by type find a differentiated split: constrained daily activities, meal preparation, laundry, remain mostly female, while activities that can be shifted in time, repairs, paperwork, are less so. One hypothesis put forward to explain it concerns the degree of time constraint: a task that can be postponed or chosen lends itself better to flexible sharing than a task that recurs every day at a fixed hour. It remains an interpretation of the observed regularities.
The same distinction holds within parental work: play and outings are more equally shared than care and calendar management.
Invisible work
Classic surveys measure observable activities, and capture poorly the so-called mental load, that is anticipation, planning and checking, which do not correspond to a slot in a diary. The notion has circulated widely in public debate, but in the literature it covers dimensions that are not always defined in the same way from one study to the next.
Some work has proposed measuring that dimension through specific questions about who thinks about what. Results show a more unequal split than that of time, but the measure is young and disputed.
The effect of a child's arrival
Several longitudinal studies find trajectories diverging at the birth of the first child, including in couples whose sharing was balanced beforehand.
Economic work on the effect of parenthood on earnings, notably by Henrik Kleven and colleagues, finds a sharp break for mothers and almost none for fathers, in every country studied, with varying magnitudes.
These results are descriptive. They establish a break at the time of birth without isolating its cause, and the explanations put forward, social norms, pre-existing pay gaps, the organisation of leave, are the subject of work that examines them separately, none of which suffices to account for the whole.
What reporting distorts
When the two members of a couple are asked separately, the sum of reported shares regularly exceeds one hundred per cent. Each overestimates their contribution, more markedly on valued tasks.
Daily diaries reduce that bias without eliminating it, which is the main argument for preferring that format to global estimation questions.
Key points
The gap in parental work narrows faster than the gap in domestic work.
Daily, constrained tasks remain the most unequally distributed.
Asked separately, the two members of a couple report shares whose sum exceeds one hundred per cent.
This article describes documented mechanisms and disagreements. It recommends no position, no party and no vote, and commits to no reading other than that of the work it cites.
And you, where do you stand?
The Civix test situates your convictions on six dimensions and matches you with one of the twelve profiles, without ever telling you what to think.
Start my test