Unequal gains from remote work during COVID-19 between spouses: Evidence from longitudinal data in Singapore

Zeewan Lee, Poh Lin Tan and Jie-Sheng Tan-Soo

PLOS ONE, 2025, vol. 20, issue 5, 1-31

Abstract: The COVID-19 outbreak and the rise of remote work may have generated distinct labor market outcomes for workers, depending on their occupation and adaptability to changes in the mode of work. Using panel data of married spouses around the time of the government-mandated lockdown in Singapore and difference-in-differences models, we examine the effects of remote work arrangements on salary income, work hours, and wages. We find that the benefits of remote work during the pandemic were not distributed evenly across male and female spouses—translating into longer and significant gains in salary income only for male workers who adopted full remote work arrangements. In contrast, female remote workers’ income gains were limited by disproportionately heavier household responsibilities (i.e., chores), which in turn led to constrained work hours.

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0324113 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 24113&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0324113

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0324113

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().