Did Descriptive and Prescriptive Norms About Gender Equality at Home Change During the COVID-19 Pandemic? A Cross-National Investigation
Status Publisher Language English Country United States Media print-electronic
Document type Journal Article
- Keywords
- COVID-19, cross-national comparison, descriptive gender norms, domestic work, gender stereotypes, prescriptive gender norms, work-family division,
- Publication type
- Journal Article MeSH
Using data from 15 countries, this article investigates whether descriptive and prescriptive gender norms concerning housework and child care (domestic work) changed after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Results of a total of 8,343 participants (M = 19.95, SD = 1.68) from two comparable student samples suggest that descriptive norms about unpaid domestic work have been affected by the pandemic, with individuals seeing mothers' relative to fathers' share of housework and child care as even larger. Moderation analyses revealed that the effect of the pandemic on descriptive norms about child care decreased with countries' increasing levels of gender equality; countries with stronger gender inequality showed a larger difference between pre- and post-pandemic. This study documents a shift in descriptive norms and discusses implications for gender equality-emphasizing the importance of addressing the additional challenges that mothers face during health-related crises.
Centre of Social and Psychological Sciences SAS Bratislava Slovakia
FernUniversität in Hagen Germany
Indiana University Bloomington IN
Inland Norway University of Applied Science Innlandet Norway
Leuphana University Lüneburg Germany
Masaryk University Brno Czech Republic
Miami University Oxford OH USA
Nanyang Technological University Singapore
Pontificia Universidad Javeriana Bogotá Colombia
Research Foundation Flanders Brussels Belgium
Sunway University Subang Jaya Malaysia
Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv Ukraine
The University of Arizona Tucson USA
The University of British Columbia Vancouver Canada
The University of Sydney New South Wales Australia
UiT The Arctic University of Norway Tromsø Norway
University of Amsterdam The Netherlands
University of Bern Switzerland
University of Geneva Switzerland
University of Kaiserslautern Landau Landau Germany
University of Washington Seattle USA
University of Zurich Switzerland
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