If You're Happy and You Know It, Clap Your Hands: How Do Mothers and Fathers Really Feel about Child Caregiving?

Rachel Connelly and Jean Kimmel ()
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Jean Kimmel: Western Michigan University

No 7531, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: This paper considers the question posed by popular media, do women like doing child care more than men? Using experienced emotions data paired with 24 hour time diaries from the 2010 American Time Use Survey, the paper explores gender differences in how men and women who have done some child caregiving on the previous day feel when engaged in a set of common daily activities. We find that both men and women enjoy their time in child caregiving, men as much, or even more so, than women as evidenced by their average values for happiness, tiredness, and stress, their predicted values for the same three emotions and via an aggregated statistic, the unpleasantness index. Counter-factual unpleasantness indices provide evidence that difference between men and women come almost completely from differences in their experience emotions rather than from differences in how they use their time.

Keywords: time use; subjective well-being; child care; gender wage gap; experienced emotions; happiness (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D13 J13 J16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 34 pages
Date: 2013-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem, nep-hap, nep-ltv and nep-spo
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Published - published in: Feminist Economics, 2015, 21 (1), 1-34

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