When Gender Kicks in: an Experimental Study of Work from Home and Attitudes to Household Work and Childcare

When Gender Kicks in: an Experimental Study of Work from Home and Attitudes to Household Work and Childcare

Elena Stancanelli (PSE)

You may follow the seminar at the following link.

ABSTRACT:

We study how working from home links to gendered attitudes about household work and childcare. Using a vignette experiment embedded in a regular Dutch population representative survey, we randomly vary the gender of the partner working from home in a hypothetical dual-earner couple. When presented with various routine and emergency chores, respondents, on average, agree that the partner working from home should execute them, and the extent of agreement is significantly larger when the vignette randomly depicts a man, rather than a woman, working from home. These differences in respondents’ gendered expectations around performing chores are not statistically significant in the baseline scenario where no partner works from home. All in all, the evidence gathered indicates that Work from Home may blast rather than boost gender norms around household work and childcare.

BIO:

Elena Stancanelli is Professor of Economics at the Paris School of Economics, and Research Director at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), specialized in applied household economics, time allocation, gender and conflict economics. She earned her M.A. degree in Economics at the University of Warwick in the UK and her Ph.D in Economics at the European University Institute of Florence, in Italy. She is lifetime member of the Executive Committee of the Society of the Economics of the Household (SEHO). She is also IZA research fellow, and Co-Editor of the Review of the Economics of the Household.