Gender Role Attitudes Cannot Explain How British Couples Responded to Increased Housework Demands during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

Previous research has shown that gender role attitudes can predict changes in couples’ housework division over critical life events, but these studies might have suffered from endogeneity because such life events are anticipated and may be affected by gender role attitudes. In contrast, the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic was a truly exogenous shock that hit couples unexpectedly. Estimating fixed-effects regression models, the authors examine the role of gender ideologies in how couples adjusted their division of housework during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 compared with a prepandemic baseline observation. The data cover 3,219 couples from the UK Household Longitudinal Study. Both partners spent substantially more time on housework throughout the COVID-19 crisis than before, especially in the early stages. However, we found no evidence that individuals’ or couples’ precrisis gender role attitudes affected changes in men’s and women’s absolute or relative contributions to housework at any time during the lockdown.