Work Interruptions and the Child Penalty: The role of parental gender

This paper examines within-day work interruptions due to childcare as a candidate micro-level mechanism behind the child penalty. Using time-use diaries from the American Time Use Survey (ATUS, 2003–2023), we apply survival analysis combined with Random Survival Forests, Gradient Boosting, SHAP values, and Accumulated Local Effects plots to model the time until a working parent’s first interruption. Parental gender is the dominant predictor across all methods: fathers face an instantaneous interruption hazard about 61 per cent below mothers’ (HR=0.389; 95% CI: 0.346–0.438), a gap robust to competing-risks decomposition, alternative censoring thresholds, and a stratified specification. Higher education and income are associated with greater, not lower, interruption risk. A cross-national extension to eight countries confirms the universality of the gender gap, with male hazard ratios below one everywhere (0.388 in the United States to 0.657 in Finland). These findings document a high-frequency margin of gender inequality and provide cross-sectional evidence of a daily mechanism that may contribute to explaining the child penalty.