Does Involved Fathering Produce a Larger Total Workload for Fathers Than for Mothers? Evidence from Norway

• Author: Ragni Hege Kitterød,Marit Rønsen
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/fare.12264
• Published date: 01 July 2017
• Date: 01 July 2017

R H K Institute for Social Research Norway

M R Statistics Norway (retired)

Does Involved Fathering Produce a Larger Total

Workload for Fathers Than for Mothers? Evidence

from Norway

Objective: To compare mothers’ and fathers’

total workloads within couples with different

work-time arrangements in a social democratic

welfare state (Norway) and explore possible

changes in the 1990s and 2000s.

Background: Women’s double workload in

families with two full-time jobs has been well

documented. However, some argue that fathers,

too, may experience the double burden of mar-

ket and domestic work as they become more

involved in parenting.

Method: The data are from the Norwegian

Time Use Surveys conducted in 1990, 2000,

and 2010 among representative samples of

the adult population. A subsample of cou-

pled other-sex-parents with at least one child

younger than age 20 years were used in the

present study. Total workload is the sum of

Institute for Social Research, Postbox 3233, Elisenberg,Oslo

0208, Norway (hege.kitterod@samfunnsforskning.no).

© 2017 The Authors. Family Relations published by Wiley

Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of National Council on Family

Relations.

This is an open access article under the terms of the Cre-

ativeCommons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which

permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium,

provided the original work is properly cited and is not used

for commercial purposes.

Key Words: Childcare issues, father involvement, gender

differences, work–family issues.

paid and unpaid work activities reported in a

time diary. Standard multivariate ordinary least

square regressions were used to explore gender

differences.

Results: Full-time work for both parents ent-

ailed approximately equal total workloads for

fathers and mothers. However, fathers’ total

workload exceeded mothers’ in full-time and

part-time couples with school-aged children.

Conclusion: Despite equal total workloads and

reduced specialization, mothers still do less paid

work and more family work than fathers in cou-

ples where both work full-time in Norway. This

is partly related to the gender-segregated labor

market. In full-time and part-time couples with

school-aged children, fathers’ longer working

hours are not fully offset by more family work

for mothers.

Implications: Work–family reconciliation pol-

icies promoting mothers’ employment and fat-

hers’ family work may have the potential to

reduce gender imbalances in parent’s total

workloads and moderate gendered specializa-

tion patterns.

B

In The Second Shift, Hochschild (1989) argued

that full-time work implied a double burden for

mothers in the United States. On the basis of

in-depth interviews with 50 couples, she found

468 Family Relations 66 (July 2017): 468–483

DOI:10.1111/fare.12264

Involved Fathering and Total Workload 469

that fathers did not increase their domestic work

in response to their partner’s paid work, and

therefore concluded that mothers had to do a

second shift of domestic labor at home in addi-

tion to their paid market labor (the rst shift).

This resulted in a greater total workload for

mothers than for fathers, amounting to an extra

month of labor per year. Researchers have since

compared the total workloads of mothers and

fathers in different couple types and discussed

possible remedies for mothers’ extra workload

(Blair-Loy, Hochschild, Pugh, Williams, &

Hartmann, 2015). In particular, these ques-

tions have been explored by researchers using

diary-based time-use surveys (e.g., Gershuny,

2003; Gershuny, Sullivan, & Robinson, 2014;

Milkie, Raley, & Bianchi, 2009; Sayer,England,

Bittman, & Bianchi, 2009). Time diaries are

usually regarded as the best source of data on

people’s time allocation, particularly concerning

unpaid work. Some have found that a full-time

job still involves longer total workloads for

mothers than for fathers, although the gender

gap is usually more modest than in Hochschild’s

study. Moreover, results differ depending on

couples’ work-time arrangements and whether

researchers account for parallel activities, or

so-called multitasking (Craig, 2007; Sayer et al.,

2009).

Most of the research in this eld applies

to so-called liberal welfare states such as the

United States, Australia, and Canada, in which

long standard work hours coupled with a lack

of work–family reconciliation policies may

result in heavy workloads for employed moth-

ers. Shorter standard work hours and more

developed work–family policies are expected

to facilitate more egalitarian gender patterns

of work and family life (Hochschild, 1989;

Stalker, 2011). In addition, it has been argued

that shifts toward more involved fatheringcould

imply that the double burden of market and

domestic work is increasingly shared by fathers,

at least when the father works full-time in the

labor market (Stalker, 2011). However, less

systematic research exists on gender imbalances

in parents’ total workload from countries with

more established work–family reconciliation

policies; the recent research that does exist

comprises descriptive statistics of all parents,

irrespective of work-time arrangement, and

indicates that women and men tend to have

similar total workloads with regard to mean

number of hours worked (e.g., Molèn 2012).

There is also a lack of studies that examine how

parents’ total workloads have changed across

time and whether changing gender imbalances

may be related to family policy expansion and

shifting social and cultural norms.

The present study lls in some of these gaps

by analyzing the trend in mothers’ and fathers’

total work hours in a social democratic wel-

fare state (Norway), using diary-based time-use

data from 1990, 2000, and 2010. In line with

Sayer et al. (2009), we distinguish among cou-

ples with different work-time arrangements and

between parents with school-aged children only

versus those with at least one preschooler. The

latter group may also include older children.

Previous analyses revealed a large increase in

fathers’ housework and childcare activitiesin the

1990s and 2000s in Norway (Kitterød & Rønsen,

2013). The vast majority of couples are now dual

earners, but about 3 in 10 women between 25

and 54 years of age work part-time, while most

men work full-time (Statistics Norway, 2015).

In the present study, we compared the relative

total workload of fathers and mothers in cou-

ples with different work-time arrangements and

explored how those relative differences changed

as fathers became more involved with parenting

in the 1990s and 2000s.

Although gender-role equality in couples has

been a political ambition for decades in Nor-

way, policy reforms were notably ambivalent in

the 1990s as measures to explicitly advance gen-

der convergence were often countered with mea-

sures considered by many to be a backlash to

gender equality. The 2000s, however, were char-

acterized by more uniformly gender-equalizing

measures. Likewise, the public discourse in the

1990s circled around parents’ time squeeze and

too little time with children, whereas in the

2000s there was a greater acceptance of for-

mal day care for small children and full-time

work for mothers as well as fathers (Ellingsaeter,

Kitterød, & Lyngstad, 2017).

First, we explored whether any changes

occurred in mothers’ and fathers’ total workload

in the 1990s and 2000s in accordance with

the changing work–family policies of the two

decades. Then we examined the importance of

accounting for parallel activities and time with

children. We also explored differencesin gender

imbalances in total workload across weekdays

and weekends, and looked at gender differences

in perceived time pressure.