I care, you clean? Gendered effects of informal care on couple housework and leisure time

Despite a shift towards more balanced gender roles, women continue to carry out the bulk of domestic work at home, while facing competing demands from outside the household. This paper investigates the gendered effect of providing care to an older parent outside the household on the allocation of time of individuals within couples. We focus on time spent on housework and on leisure with and without the partner. Data are drawn from the latest French Time-Use Survey (Enquête Emploi Du Temps, 2010). To tackle endogeneity issues, we instrument informal care by having at least one parent alive. Our results differ according to gender. When providing care, women tend to spend less time on housework. Irrespective of their own caregiving status, they spend more time on household chores when their male partners care for an older parent. In contrast, men's time allocation within the household appears to be less impacted by any informal care provision. The former effects are driven by women who perform less housework. The main potential mechanisms relate to gender norms, with differing responses in the use of outsourcing depending on whether the caregiver is the man or the woman and with reactions to a perceived violation of gender norms.