The Role of Children and Work-from-Home in Gender Labor Market Asymmetries: Evidence from the COVID-19 Pandemic in Latin America

Mariana Marchionni, Inés Berniell, Leonardo Gaspatini and Mariana Viollaz

No 4612, Asociación Argentina de Economía Política: Working Papers from Asociación Argentina de Economía Política

Abstract: Asymmetry in childcare responsibilities is one of the main reasons behind gender gaps in the labor market. In that context, the ability to work from home may alleviate the hindrances of women with children to participate in the labor market. We study these issues in Latin America, a region with wide gender gaps, in the framework of a major shock that severely affected employment: the COVID-19 pandemic. In particular, we estimate models of job loss exploiting micro data from the World Bank’ s high-frequency phone household surveys conducted immediately after the onset of the pandemic. We find that the mitigating effect of working from home on the severity of job losses was especially relevant for women with children. These effects were larger in countries/periods in which the containment measures implemented by governments against the spread of the disease were more stringent. The results are consistent with a plausible mechanism: due to the traditional distribution of childcare responsibilities within the household, women with children were more likely to stay home during school closures, and therefore the ability to work from home was crucial for them to keep their jobs.

JEL-codes: D63 J01 J16 J22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 25 pages
Date: 2022-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-gen and nep-lam
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://aaep.org.ar/works/works2022/4612.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The role of children and work-from-home in gender labor market asymmetries: evidence from the COVID-19 pandemic in Latin America (2023)
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:aep:anales:4612

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Asociación Argentina de Economía Política: Working Papers from Asociación Argentina de Economía Política Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Juan Manuel Quintero ().