The Impact of COVID-19 on Childcare and Gender Equity

• In Event: When Work and Care Collide: Labor, Policy, and Equity in Early Childhood

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic caused an unprecedented disruption to caregiving, exposing the critical link between childcare and the labor market. While optimists speculated this shock might improve gender equity by equalizing caregiving, others cautioned that the impact would fall disproportionately on mothers, possibly undoing women’s progress in the labor market. Yet measuring the differential impact of the COVID-19 childcare shock on mothers is challenging due to women simultaneously having greater exposure to in-person jobs in sectors experiencing higher layoff and unemployment rates. Although prior studies documented that women with children suffered worse labor market outcomes during the pandemic, it remains unclear how much was due to the lack of childcare versus the lack of job opportunities (Heggeness 2020, Zamarro and Prados 2021).

We use a nationally representative panel survey of 2,500 working parents between Mother’s and Father’s Day of 2020 to examine the differential impact of the COVID-19 childcare shock on working  mothers versus fathers. Unlike other studies, we specifically asked about changes in work status and the reasons for such changes, including childcare. Drawing on this rich set of  demographic, household, and labor market factors, we explored gender differences in household time use, work status, mental health, job satisfaction, and access to employer benefits. To further address the endogeneity between childcare and labor market outcomes, we used the variation in pre-pandemic characteristics, including age of youngest child and the presence of a non-working spouse, to identify parents who were more versus less vulnerable to the childcare shock.

Using a difference-in-difference model, we compared the experiences of mothers versus fathers in these two groups to estimate the differential impact of the childcare shock on female outcomes. We find that mothers in the more vulnerable group were 15 percentage points more likely to experience an adverse labor market outcome due to childcare than similarly situated fathers. Most of this gender differential stemmed from impacts on hours reduced rather than job loss. Although all parents experienced decreases in well-being, only mothers in the more vulnerable group experienced significantly lower job satisfaction. Indeed, only paid family leave—a rarely used benefit—seemed to narrow the gap in hours reductions between mothers and fathers in the more vulnerable group. Other new COVID-19 workplace practices such as working from home and childcare subsidies had no effect on the gender gap in hours lost due to childcare.

Our results have important implications for ongoing policy debates about how best to provide affordable high-quality childcare even after the pandemic. First, better measurement of the impact of the COVID-19 childcare shock on mother’s outcomes reveals that while childcare is essential, the magnitude of the problem is not so large as to make potential solutions infeasible. Second, documenting the multi-faceted nature of childcare and work arrangements demonstrates that there is no singular solution. Finally, the low take-up of paid family leave during the pandemic confirms that significant barriers remain even for well-established policies aimed at addressing the ongoing childcare crisis in the U.S.

Author

• Alicia Sasser Modestino, Northeastern University
  Presenting Author