Couples have adapted their domestic and family division of labour very differently to the challenges of the corona situation. This is now shown in a new study by Wiso Professor Karsten Hank and Anja Steinbach from the University of Duisburg-Essen

Does the COVID-19 pandemic have an impact on gender inequalities? This is being discussed in the media and in science. Professor Dr Karsten Hank from the Institute of Sociology and Social Psychology (ISS) at the Faculty of Management, Economics and Social Sciences at the University of Cologne and his colleague Professor Anja Steinbach from the University of Duisburg-Essen have now examined the changes in the division of domestic work and childcare in couple and family relationships in Germany before and during the corona crisis.

The results have now been published in the Journal of Family Research. Housework (with activities such as washing clothes, cooking, cleaning) and childcare were considered separately in the study. Professor Hank summarizes the most important findings: "Already with the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, fears have been expressed - some of them very loudly - that the crisis and its consequences could lead to a return to old role patterns and undo progress made in recent decades in the field of gender equality. These fears seem largely unfounded in view of the findings of our study. However, even in the period before Corona, in 60 percent of the couples we surveyed, women were already mainly or exclusively responsible for housework and childcare. A 'traditional' division of labour in this sense is therefore not a new phenomenon typical of Corona in Germany.

The results of the sociological study are based on preliminary data from the relationship and family panel (pairfam), which has been running since 2008 and is financed by the German Research Foundation (DFG), and its internet-based COVID-19 supplementary study, which provides a first insight into the dynamics of domestic and family division of labour among couples in Germany during the pandemic. For the study, survey data from more than 3,000 study participants aged 19 to 49 years from mid-May to early July 2020 were used.

Although no fundamental changes in established patterns of gender-specific division of labour are apparent overall, there are nevertheless indications of certain shifts towards the two extremes ("traditional" and "role reversal") of distribution. Karsten Hank says: "Both the proportion of women who are exclusively responsible for housework and childcare and the proportion of men who are mainly or exclusively responsible for it in the partnership increased during the pandemic. The proportion of couples who have abandoned the traditional role allocation and in which the man has the main responsibility for the household and children has risen relatively sharply, but remains at a very low level of 5 to 7 percent in absolute terms."

Looking at changes within couple relationships, there are roughly equal proportions of couples in which the relative contribution of the female partner has increased or decreased (about 20 percent each). Especially in previously egalitarian relationships, however, women have more often assumed the predominant or entire responsibility for housework and child care during the crisis. If male partners have increased their share, this has usually only occurred up to the threshold of an equal division of labour. The main part of the work was therefore rarely taken over by men.

While changes in the amount of time spent working led to adjustments in the relative contribution of men to housework and childcare, this was not the case for women. Anja Steinbach classifies the results of the study as follows: "The partner's contribution to the completion of household and family tasks seems to be independent of her time burden through gainful employment, while men (can) flexibly adjust their share of household and family work when their working hours change. Their contribution therefore appears to be more negotiable in the partnership than that of the woman."

Prof. Steinbach also emphasizes: "The general re-traditionalization of gender relations during the Corona crisis, which is sometimes claimed in public discussions, cannot be determined with our data. Rather, different processes of adaptation to the changed framework conditions could be observed in couple relationships, which in part actually led to an even greater assumption of the traditional role of housewife and mother with the partner, but also to an increase in the proportion of couples in which the traditional roles are swapped and the man assumes more responsibility for the household and children. "It is not COVID-19 that is responsible for the overall rather traditional pattern of domestic and family division of labour that we observe in Germany today, but rather the still strongly traditional role models and institutional structures in this country," says WiSo-Prof. Hank.

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