Less Work, More Labor: School Closures and Work Hours During the COVID-19 Pandemic in Austria

ABSTRACTThis article explores the gendered impact of school closures on paid work hours during the COVID-19 pandemic in Austria. Using data from the Austrian Corona Panel Project (ACPP) covering generalized school closures from March 2020 to April 2021, the study examines adjustments in work hours by gender and parental status. The descriptive data show general reductions in work time, especially in the first months. From July 2020 onward, however, mothers reduced work hours more than fathers when schools were closed – and they increased time spent on childcare, while fathers reduced theirs. Using OLS and fixed effects models, the study confirms that mothers reduced their work hours during school closures more than any other group. In contrast, fathers reduced their work hours the least – even less than individuals without children. Finally, there is some evidence that school closures capture policy stringency in high-incidence phases of the COVID-19 pandemic.HIGHLIGHTS In Austria, mothers reduced paid work time more than fathers in response to pandemic school closures.In contrast, fathers reduced their work time even less than individuals without children.School closures thus triggered a gendered labor market response among parents.The additional unpaid care work burden on women is a potential mechanism for these effects.COVID-19 policy responses may have exacerbated existing gender differences in the labor market.KEYWORDS: Work timelabor supplygender inequalityCOVID-19school closuresJEL Codes: C23J16J22 ACKNOWLEDGMENTSWe thank Vera Huwe, Jakob Kapeller, Ulli Lich, Alexander Obermueller, Alyssa Schneebaum and Yana van der Meulen-Rodgers for valuable insights and feedback.Notes1 More than 47 percent of employed women in Austria work part time (Statistik Austria Citation2020).2 Throughout the pandemic, Austria did not issue a work-from-home directive.3 School closures were enacted nationwide throughout 2020 and up to April 2021. Kindergartens are the responsibility of the federal states and therefore their closings were not unified since the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis.4 So far, there is limited data on gender differences.5 See Arbeitsvertragsrechts-Anpassungsgesetz § 18b (https://www.ris.bka.gv.at/NormDokument.wxe?Abfrage=Bundesnormen&Gesetzesnummer=10008872&Paragraf=18b).6 Unfortunately, households cannot be linked and only limited information on partners is available, especially with regard to labor market outcomes.7 At 14, children are considered of age in several respects in Austria, including sexual consent, criminal responsibility, and self-determination in medical, religious, and educational matters.8 We do not control for pre-pandemic work hours in our estimates, although we show the descriptive evidence in Table 1. This is because the question was asked retrospectively when individuals first entered the survey, which implies that the data are likely less reliable over successive waves and that person-level weights are not comparable across waves.9 For the level of monthly average work hours by gender and parental status, see Figure A1 in the Appendix.10 While school summer holidays fall in the months of July and August in Austria (varying by county), winter holidays in December and February, and spring holidays in March or April, these are coded as open here, since these holidays are predictable for parents.11 Since we do not have reliable pre-pandemic information of work time and school closures do not vary regionally in Austria, we are not able to estimate a DiD model.12 See Table A1 in the Appendix for the full results including all control variables.13 We investigate this question by differentiating between school closures for over 14-year-olds in the robustness checks in the following section.14 That every group reduces their working hours less in periods where schools are only closed for older students might be explained by the fact that containment measures were relaxed during these phases.Additional informationNotes on contributorsLisa HanzlLisa Hanzl is a PhD candidate at the Department of Economics at the Free University of Berlin. She earned an MSc from the University of Economics in Vienna and has been part of the graduate school “Political Economy of Inequality” at the Institute for Socioeconomics of the University of Duisburg-Essen.Miriam RehmMiriam Rehm, PhD is Professor of Socioeconomics at the University Duisburg-Essen with a focus on empirical inequality research.