The gendered division of unpaid labor during the Covid-19 crisis: did anything change? Evidence from Italy

Abstract This study examines whether and how the lockdown due to the Covid-19 epidemic affected the division of household activities between partners in a sample of dual-earner heterosexual couples in Italy. Although women have been more and more present on the labor market, inequality in household activities remains high, with Italian women doing 86,4% of house chores and childcare tasks. Past research sought an explanation without reaching consensus, notwithstanding the effort to disentangle three main factors: availability of time, availability of resources, or gender roles. The Covid-19 crisis, which forced many couples to stay at home for at least one month and a half, allows assessing the weight of these different factors in the division of household activities. We conducted an online survey, which one partner per couple has been asked to answer (N = 934 cases, 613 of which are workers of the University of Milan). Our results show that the division of household and care activities remains highly gendered for the more unpleasant tasks, while some others, such as cooking, are less gender sensitive. Women have still a greater burden of house chores and childcare, no matter whether they had their income or suffered some loss, and no matter whether they or their partner worked at home or the workplace. Therefore, we conclude that the lockdown provoked by Covid-19 has shown that gender, intended as a social construction, is still a determinant that explains the inequality in household activities. This result is even more important because the Covid-19 related restrictions might in the future impact women’s careers, already hindered by many factors in the Italian labor market, by assigning them an overload of domestic tasks, especially childcare tasks, such as homeschooling, which will partly continue in the coming months.