A Room of One’s Own. Work from Home and the Gendered Allocation of Time

The traditional specialization of men in paid work and women in housework is
rooted in the spatial separation of these activities. We examine the possible conse-
quences of the recent expansion of Work from Home (WfH) for the gendered allocation
of time. We focus on the time devoted to housework by men and women who work
from home versus at the workplace, before and after the Covid pandemic. Using data
on several thousand workers drawn from the American Time Use Survey, we find that
the gender gap in unpaid work has declined by about 27 minutes per day, i.e. by
about 40% for remote workers. Among remote workers, women now spend more time
on paid work and less on unpaid work, whereas men do more household chores.