Working from Home and COVID-19: The Chances and Risks for Gender Gaps

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DOI: 10.1007/s10272-020-0938-5

Melanie Arntz, Sarra Ben Yahmed and Francesco Berlingieri

Working from Home and COVID-19: The Chances and Risks for Gender Gaps As the COVID-19 pandemic causes a record number of people to work from home, this disruptive event will likely have a long-lasting impact on work arrangements. Given existing research on the effects of working from home on hours worked and wages, an increased availability of working from home may provide a chance for women to catch up with their male counterparts. Yet, the need to simultaneously care for children during the COVID-19 lockdown may also revive traditional gender roles, potentially counteracting such gains. We discuss the likely effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on gender gaps in the labour market and at home in light of recent empirical findings and novel statistics on the heterogeneous structure of work arrangements among couples. We construct a novel teleworkability index that differentiates between fully teleworkable, partly teleworkable and on-site jobs and find that in about a third of households the COVID-19 shock is likely to induce shifts in the intra-household allocation of tasks from mothers to fathers.

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the way many people work. It has notably increased the share of people working from home, creating an unexpected shock to the number of people working remotely instead of on-site. In 2018, the share of employees working at least regularly from home was around 12% in Germany, above 30% in the Netherlands, Finland, Iceland, Luxembourg and Denmark, and around or below 5% in Greece, Italy, Bulgaria and Romania (Eurostat, 2020). These numbers have increased dramatically during the COVID-19 lockdown, although differently across demographic groups. Indeed, since the start of the social distancing measures, many firms have made it possible for their employees to work © The Author(s) 2020. Open Access: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Open Access funding provided by ZBW – Leibniz Information Centre for Economics.

Melanie Arntz, ZEW – Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research, Mannheim; and University of Heidelberg, Germany. Sarra Ben Yahmed, ZEW – Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research, Mannheim, Germany. Francesco Berlingieri, ZEW – Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research, Mannheim, Germany.

ZBW – Leibniz Information Centre for Economics

from home in order to slow down the spread of the coronavirus.1 Working from home (WFH) has long been considered a means of improving work-life balance, especially for parents. However, during the lockdown, many parents have to combine paid work and full-time childcare, which is likely to reduce their productivity and the expected benefits of WFH. Nevertheless, parents, and especially mothers, could benefit from the increased availability of WFH arrangements thanks to changes in technology and firm culture in the post-COVID-19 era (Alon et