Abstract
This study explored the gender gap in domestic labor at three time points, namely, before the pandemic (January 2020), during the early stages of the pandemic (May 2020), and more than one year after the expansion (May 2021). Using a two-wave social survey on work and family, this study observed no change in the gender gap in domestic labor for the majority of women and men in the early stages of the pandemic. Alternatively, the study noted a narrowing of the gender gap for 40–50% of the female and male respondents for housework and childcare one year after the outbreak of the pandemic. The associations between time availability, as well as relative resource factors and changes in the gender gap, were more clearly observed in the early stages of the pandemic than one year after the outbreak. Although this study observed a sign of a decline in gender gap for domestic labor one year after the outbreak of the pandemic, it is necessary to exercise caution and qualify such finding. Even in May 2021, a significant difference is still evident between women and men in their frequencies of all the domestic tasks. Furthermore, the data used in this study, which measures women’s and men’s involvement in housework and childcare based on frequency, may not adequately capture the increased burden of domestic labor on women, which had already been high even before the pandemic.
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Notes
- 1.
The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) announced that until December 2020, schools were temporarily closed after confirming positive cases of COVID-19 in schools. The closure was in effect according to the number of days necessary for local public health centers to test and identify people in close contact with COVID-19. After December 2020, the MEXT asked the schools to decide whether or not to close based on the status of the pandemic in the region and the opinion of the local public health centers, even when positive cases of COVID-19 were confirmed in schools.
- 2.
See Chap. 2 for details on the WLCV survey.
- 3.
In total, 21% of women and 18% of men experienced being furloughed between January and November 2020. Among those who experienced being furloughed, 63% of women were under nonregular employment, and 78% of men were under regular employment in May 2020. The average lengths of furlough was 37 and 19 days for women and men, respectively, and 60 and 72% of women and men, respectively, received allowances during the furlough.
- 4.
Three properties, namely, consistency, normality, and efficiency of maximum likelihood estimation, which are used in multinominal logit models, have been proven to hold as the sample size approaches ∞ (Long, 1997). Although Long does not provide an absolute standard for sample size when applying the maximum likelihood estimation, he cites that estimation for data with less than 100 samples is risky and that estimation is adequate when the sample size is >500. In this sense, although the estimation of data with a relatively small sample size in this study is not necessarily inappropriate, one should note that the results of the analyses must be validated with other data in further studies.
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This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number JP18H00936.
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Nishimura, J., Bae, J., Toma, K. (2023). Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on the Gender Gap in Domestic Labor: Evidence from a Two-Wave Survey in Japan. In: Matsuda, S., Takenoshita, H. (eds) Changes in Work and Family Life in Japan Under COVID-19. SpringerBriefs in Population Studies(). Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-5850-4_3
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