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Press Conference • 15.07.2020Parents during the Corona Crisis – Forced to Improvise
Has the COVID-19 pandemic changed gender roles in work and family life? How do parents fare in systemically important jobs? Will the experience of working from home have an impact on future working life? These questions were the focus of the press conference on 14 July 2020 in Wiesbaden to introduce the new BiB study Parents during the Corona Crisis - Forced to Improvise. The Corona crisis has led to changes in working life which affect parents in very different ways. In particular, the increasing use of the opportunity to work remotely home (‘home office’) plays an ever greater role, depending on the job.
Irreversible Transformation Process of the Work Environment through the Home Office
Prof. Dr. Norbert F. Schneider
Source: BiB
The head of the BiB, Prof. Norbert F. Schneider pointed out that in the years prior to the Corona Crisis only a minority of employees made use of the opportunity of working from home: “In 2018, only 5 percent of the workforce worked remotely at least half of their working time. Currently, 23 percent of employees work mainly from home, thus the share has increased more than fourfold,” analysed the sociologist.
“This is a process that has been accelerated and will proceed irreversibly,” he emphasised. The new normality of the working world could be characterised by a new balance of periods of physical presence at the workplace and working from home. This development offers a number of opportunities and advantages, as well as risks and challenges. The emerged right to work from home must not become a duty: “Employees should not be forced to work at home,” said Prof. Schneider.
System-Relevant – But Poorly Paid: Mothers
Dr. Inga Laß
Source: BiB
One of the positive effects of remote work is certainly the ability to better reconcile family and work. But what about parents who are employed in so-called ‘systemically important occupations’ who cannot work remotely at all?
Dr. Inga Laß showed how their situation is against the background of the Corona crisis by means of findings from the BiB Study. It is mainly mothers who work in systemically relevant occupations with comparably low wages. More than one third of the mothers employed in systemically relevant jobs earn less than 1,100 euros. Moreover, many of them work part time. “The findings show that mothers in systemically important jobs earn considerably less than their partners. However, it is very rare that both parents are employed in systemically relevant jobs at the same time,” the sociologist emphasised.
Much More Time for the Family: Fathers in Times of COVID-19
PD Dr. Martin Bujard
Source: BiB
In the course of the Corona crisis, the division of labour between men and women in organising family life has changed as well, as found out in the BiB study. “Our findings show that the hours spent on paid work decreased on average by about two and a half hours for fathers in 2020 compared to 2018,” Dr. Bujard analysed. For mothers, the time spent on paid work has only decreased by about one hour because they work more often in systemically important occupations.
If we look at the share of family work, the picture is reversed: The share of fathers in family working time has risen from around 33 to 41 percent. In this special situation during the lockdown, fathers achieved a historically high share in the distribution of family work – albeit still less than mothers. In his opinion, these findings prove that there can be no evidence of a much discussed retraditionalisation of gender roles in the course of the Corona crisis.