A seminar by Janeen Baxter (Life Course Centre, UQ)

COVID19 upended many aspects of work and family lives. Early studies during the pandemic in Australia identified worsening outcomes in gender inequality during the pandemic, but we do not know if these patterns have continued afterwards. This presentation uses data from an ongoing household panel study (Households, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia) to assess the impact of the pandemic on men’s and women’s time on paid and unpaid work. Our results show that the gender gap in paid work closed slowly between 2001 and 2019 from 25 hours to 19 hours and further closed in the first year of the pandemic (2020) due to both a decrease in fathers’ paid work time and an increase in mothers’ time. However, since 2020, fathers have increased their paid work time to pre-pandemic levels while mothers are still continuing to increase their paid work time toward pre-pandemic levels.

The gender gap in unpaid work also closed over the period 2001 to 2019, but there is no evidence of further closure during the pandemic. Difference-in-differences models are used to compare outcomes across three cities where lockdown rules varied. We find no impact of lockdowns on gender gaps in paid work hours. However, both mothers and fathers increased their time on unpaid work during lockdowns with the increase substantially larger for mothers. Overall, the pandemic and the lockdowns had a greater impact on women’s hours of paid and unpaid work than men’s with women increasing their time spent on both kinds of work. But as a historical event the impact of the pandemic appears to have been fleeting.

Janeen Baxter is ARC Kathleen Fitzpatrick Laureate Fellow and Director of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Children and Families over the Life Course. She is located at the Institute for Social Science Research at The University of Queensland. Her research focuses on social disadvantage, gender inequality, family dynamics, life course and longitudinal studies. She has published widely in these areas including recently Family Dynamics over the Life Course (Springer, 2022). Janeen is a member of the Council for the Committee for Economic Development in Australia and the Child Support Expert Panel for the Federal Government. She serves on several other committees including the Social Policy Research Centre Advisory Committee and the Singapore Longitudinal Early Development Study. She is on the editorial board of a number of journals including Social Forces and Longitudinal and Life Course Studies.

For more information, please get in touch with the convenors Natalie Nitsche at Natalie.Nitsche@anu.edu.au and Mike Roettger at Mike.Roettger@anu.edu.au.

This seminar will be in-person and online. For online attendees, please join via the Zoom link Below:

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https://anu.zoom.us/j/88475861856?pwd=dXpjMGh1MzlrSzduNlI2SUVzdU1Qdz09

Meeting ID: 884 7586 1856
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