Paternal Part-Time Employment and Fathers' Long-Term Involvement in Child Care and Housework

Objective This study examines whether paternal part-time employment is related to greater involvement by fathers in child care and housework, both while fathers are working part-time and after they return to full-time employment. Background The study draws on four strands of theory-time availability, bargaining, gender ideology, and gender construction. It studies couples' division of labor in Germany, where policies increasingly support a dual-earner, dual-carer model. Method The study uses data from the German Socio-Economic Panel from 1991 to 2015 on employed adult fathers living together with at least one child younger than age 17 and the mother. The analytic sample comprises 51,230 observations on 8,915 fathers. Fixed effects regression techniques are used to estimate the effect of (previous) part-time employment on fathers' child-care hours, housework hours, and share of child care and housework. Results Fathers did more child care and housework while they worked part time. Yet, most fathers reverted to previous levels of involvement after returning to full-time work. The only exception was fathers with partners in full-time employment, who spent more time doing child care and took on a greater share of housework after part-time employment than before. Conclusion The findings are largely consistent with the time availability perspective, although the results for fathers with full-time employed partners indicate that the relative resources and gender ideology perspectives have some explanatory power as well.