College-educated fathers are stepping it up at home
Add Axios as your preferred source to
see more of our stories on Google.
College-educated fathers are spending less time doing paid work and more time doing things like child care and chores at home, according to a new analysis of Census data.
Why it matters: Millennial and Gen X men are more involved fathers than previous generations, a pattern that appears to have accelerated in the post-pandemic period.
Zoom in: The difference is particularly pronounced among college-educated men who are part of a couple, finds a new working paper, an analysis of census data from Ariel Binder, a research fellow at the American Institute for Boys and Men.
- He looked at how men and women use their time, comparing data from 2017-2019 with the period between 2022-2024, omitting the unusual pandemic years.
- Binder compared couples and singles, and it was the couples that saw pronounced changes.
By the numbers: Since the pre-COVID era, partnered college-educated fathers with young children cut back the time they spend on paid work by six hours a week.
- Meanwhile, they increased the time spent doing child care and housework by more than four hours. Mothers' hours were basically unchanged.
- The same changes were observed among non-college-educated men and women, although they were less pronounced.
- Fathers in this group saw only a slight decline in paid hours and a nearly three-hour uptick in unpaid work.
Reality check: Women still do much more unpaid work. Among couples with at least one young child, women do nearly 15 more hours weekly than men (down from nearly 19 hours in the pre-pandemic period).
Between the lines: For decades, women have been increasing their working hours and slightly reducing their time in unpaid work — while men's patterns have been relatively stable.
- Now, something else is going on — possibly a real cultural shift in expectations for men.
The big picture: "Women really changed their behavior over the decades leading up to the pandemic, but now this kind of shift in household priority seems to be driven by men," Binder tells Bloomberg.
- Only part of the explanation is the rise of remote work, but it's also possible that the experience of being home in the pandemic reshuffled fathers' priorities.
What to watch: There is, of course, a backlash.
The bottom line: In the wake of the pandemic, dads are getting way more into the dad thing.
