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

BERNIELL, INÉS; GASPARINI, LEONARDO; MARCHIONNI, MARIANA; VIOLLAZ, MARIANA

Córdoba

Congreso; Reunión Anual de la Asociación Argentina de Economía Política; 2022

Universidad Nacional de Córdoba

Asymmetry in childcare responsabilities is one of the main reasons behind gender gapsin the labor market. In that context, the ability to work from home may alleviatethe hindrances of women with children to participate in the labor market. We studythese issues in Latin America, a region with wide gender gaps, in the frameworkof a major shock that severely affected employment: the COVID-19 pandemic. Inparticular, we estimate models of job loss exploiting microdata from the World Bank’shigh-frequency phone household surveys conducted immediately after the onset ofthe pandemic. We find that the mitigating effect of working from home on theseverity of job losses was especially relevant for women with children. These effectswere larger in countries/periods in which the containment measures implemented bygovernments against the spread of the disease were more stringent. The results areconsistent with a plausible mechanism: due to the traditional distribution of childcareresponsibilities within the household, women with children were more likely to stayhome during school closures, and therefore the ability to work from home was crucialfor them to keep their jobs.