How to promote equity at home as moms are being forced from the workforce

Then came the pandemic. With schools moved online and child-care programs closing, women all over the country began exiting the workforce at alarming rates. My neighborhood was no exception. As school sputtered back to a start, several local moms confided that they, like me, had cut back on work to help with remote learning. For most, their male partners either maintained their usual workloads or scrambled to take on more paid work to pick up the slack. Each of us had made different calculations in determining that we, rather than our partners, should scale back our paid work to be more present at home, our reasons including “he makes more money,” “I’m more patient with remote” and “my job got axed.”

However sound the logic, what message were our kids gleaning from this sudden shift? Might they be learning that when push comes to shove, women’s paid work matters less than men’s?

To find out, I turned to cognitive scientists who study how children make sense of the world. Marjorie Rhodes, a psychology professor at New York University and director of the Conceptual Development and Social Cognition Lab, said it was reasonable to assume that children of all ages are noticing “the increasing gender division of labor during covid.” Research suggests that if left to their own devices, children may make sense of it in ways that reinforce gender stereotypes, such as that moms are better at taking care of kids and dads work to support the family. That, in turn, can shape kids’ identities and life choices.

“Kids are actively interpreting what’s going on in their daily life, trying to figure out how it relates to them,” says Rhodes. A big part of that means making sense of “how much gender should organize the world more generally.”

This holds true even for very young children. When a mother and father divide household responsibilities and child care equally, preschool-age kids “endorse fewer gender stereotypes, show more flexibility about gender roles and have less gendered occupational aspirations,” says Rhodes. A preschool boy is more likely to say it’s okay for boys to play with dolls. His twin sister may be more likely than other girls to say she wants to be a scientist or an astronaut.

And while much child policy in the United States has been driven by the assumption that kids benefit most from stay-at-home moms, a growing body of research suggests there are lifelong economic and social benefits to growing up with a working mother. An analysis of two surveys of more than 100,000 adults in 29 countries found that daughters of employed mothers completed more years of education, earned higher incomes and were more likely to be employed and in supervisory roles than daughters of mothers who did not work. Even girls whose mothers didn’t work but who grew up in places where working moms were the norm reaped benefits.

Men raised by employed moms, meanwhile, spent more time each week on housework and “more time with children, more time caring for others in their family,” says Kathleen McGinn, a professor at Harvard Business School and an author of the analysis.

McGinn says this could be as much about dads as moms. When mothers work, fathers may become more engaged in their children’s lives, providing their sons with a model for what male caretaking looks like. “A big chunk of what’s happening is that your perspective on what it is men are ‘supposed to do’ and women are ‘supposed to do’ changes when you’re in a household with an employed mom,” says McGinn. “Gender attitudes of both men and women raised by employed moms are much more egalitarian.”

Of course, the pandemic has upended family dynamics and strained parents everywhere. Many parents are struggling with job loss or are attempting to work with limited or no child care. Even families fortunate enough to have two earners have experienced major shifts in work and home responsibilities. About 865,000 women left the workforce between August and September as remote schools started back up, a number four times that of men who left during the same time frame. In October, men gained back those losses, but only about half of women returned. And according to a Pew Research survey in October, among teleworking parents with child-care duties, 50 percent of mothers had needed to reduce their work hours since the start of the pandemic, compared with 30 percent of fathers.

“We’re reinvesting in a very regressive narrative” where women work for free so that men can work for money, says Mara Bolis, associate director of women’s economic rights at Oxfam America. “Even if for a short period of time we double down on that narrative, it takes us off course” for gender equity at home and in the workplace.

Bolis is among those who fear for the generation standing watch. “I’m terrified that girls will be sent the message that women’s economic engagement is unimportant, and that women’s unpaid work is acceptable and the norm. And that our institutions didn’t value women enough to make sure they could keep doing the work they’re doing,” she says. Like many advocates, Bolis says what is needed most are broad-stroke policy solutions such as paid family leave and universal child care.

In the meantime, researchers point to immediate measures that parents can take to sidestep worst-case scenarios.

Map it out

McGinn recommends that parenting partners start with the basics: Talk about how they’re dividing household tasks. In interviews with more than a hundred dual-career couples with children, McGinn and her team are finding that most parents avoid such discussions. But those who have been most successful in having equitable divisions of household responsibility in recent months are using “old-fashioned negotiation approaches,” like mapping out time spent cooking meals or supervising remote learning on whiteboard and calendars. “The couples who are changing this are doing it in a really deliberate, explicit way,” she says.

Assign chores

Rhodes suggests giving children unpaid chores, a solution that helps parents, too. Research shows that boys who engage in traditionally female stereotypical activities like helping with cooking, cleaning and caring for younger siblings are more likely to do those things as teenagers and adults.

Talk with kids

Rhodes and Andrei Cimpian, who is also a psychology professor at New York University, recommend talking with children in an age-appropriate manner about what they’re observing, and why it’s happening. Numerous studies suggest that if parents leave children to their own devices to make sense of things like “Why are there more men in science than women?” they will rely on what Cimpian calls “shortcut” explanations that attribute “inherent” qualities to groups of people, such as “Women don’t like science.”

Cimpian says these shortcut explanations can become self-fulfilling, limiting what children believe they can or can’t do. Research demonstrates they can also make children more likely to accept social inequities as “just the way it is” rather than something that can and should be changed, adds Cimpian.

When it comes to the shifts kids are seeing in the pandemic, says Cimpian, parents could “talk frankly about the reasons” why, say, Mom is making lunch and helping with remote school while Dad is off working. For older kids, this can be an important opportunity to talk about how women’s contributions have historically been undervalued, with women making on average less money for every dollar earned by their male counterparts, and women of color typically receiving even less. In some two-earner households, that can mean it makes the most economic sense for the woman to be the one to cut back on paid work when needed, which can then compound the wage gap problem further.

Nip stereotypes in the bud

The idea is to use explanations to “disrupt” the belief that the world is naturally organized by gender, says Rhodes. “So often you’ll hear from parents that it’s okay if girls have the stereotype that girls wear pink and boys wear blue, and girls play with dolls and boys play with trucks,” she says. “But one thing we have found is that if they really early on have this idea that gender organizes what you can wear, and what you can play with, and how you’re expected to behave, then it’s easier for them to believe that gender also determines your academic potential.” So the goal should be to prevent gender stereotypes from developing at all ages, she says, adding, “And that’s true regardless of the pandemic.”

Kendra Hurley is an independent journalist specializing in public policy. Previously she researched issues impacting low-income families at an applied policy institute at the New School.