Comment la production domestique s'ajuste-t-elle au temps de travail ?

Travail, Emploi, Inégalités

Monday, November 29, 2021
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LEST, Salle 1

Enseignements du premier confinement lié au COVID-19 en France.

Anne Solaz, INED

Présentation d'un travail coécrit avec Ariane Pailhé, INED, et Lionel Wilner, INSEE

 

Titre et résumé en anglais

How does home production adjust to working time? Lessons from the French first COVID-19 lockdown

Ariane Pailhé (INED), Anne Solaz (INED), Lionel Wilner (INSEE)

In spite of the convergence in labour market participation rates between men and women, convergence in domestic sphere is still very slow. Even in countries where the dual-earner model is the norm, women continue to perform most domestic and parental work. The question we ask in this paper is whether a change in working time has the same impact on hours spent on housework chores for men and for women. Because individual choices on employment and family are related, resulting from the decision-making process at the household level, working hours are generally considered as endogenous to housework time.

The first lockdown provides a unique opportunity to overcome this methodological difficulty since it was an arguably exogenous and unanticipated shock on working time and have affected individuals regardless of their sex and family status. Our goal is to identify the response of domestic time to (own) working time, and to investigate how it might differ by sex and by family status.

France implemented a strict lockdown (stay at home order) of its entire population in order to contain the COVID-19 epidemic from 17 March. This has led to a historic decline in business, with responses of working time extremely diverse. Workers in so-called “essential activities” had to continue to working from their usual workplaces sometimes longer than usual. Workers whose work could be adapted to teleworking continued their professional activity at home, with various working time adjustment in time. We use this unique experiment as an exogenous shock affecting working time and estimate the sensitivity of unpaid work to working time.

Using the different waves of the nationally representative Epidemiology and Living Conditions (EpiCOV) survey performed from the first lockdown, we first describe the changes in domestic time performed by men and women and the division of work between partners along the first and second lockdowns. Then we use an instrumental variable approach to infer the causal relationship between the time spent on housework and working time for both men and women for individuals who were on the labour market (either employed or unemployed) just before the lockdown.

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