Homemaking is valuable work. A 2019 analysis by Salary.com estimates that if a full-time homemaker was compensated for the work they do in a year, their salary would be roughly $178,000. The macroeconomic impact is staggering. Oxfam has estimated that, globally, if all unpaid care work — like childcare and elder care — was valued at minimum wage, it would be worth $10.8 trillion a year. Incorporate other elements of homemaking, like cooking, cleaning, household shopping, and the project management of keeping a household running, and it likely nets out to trillions more.
Today, fully three-quarters of this unpaid labor is shouldered by women and girls. Globally, it will be a long time before the population reaches anything like gender parity in unpaid domestic work. But recent analysis from the Pew Research Center suggests that the needle is starting to move.
(A caveat here: most of the research referenced in this article studies dual-partner households headed by cis-hetero parents, without offering much insight into the dynamics of single-parent households, same-sex partnerships, or families that don’t conform to mainstream structures or gender roles. McKinsey has found that same-sex couples tend to divide chores more equitably, while a study from Frontiers in Psychology found that trans and gender non-binary couples tend to divide household labor, specifically childcare, by income level — an insight worthy of a separate article.)
In an analysis of several decades worth of data on American parents that don’t work for pay, Pew found that 18% of stay-at-home parents in 2021 — nearly 1 in 5 — were dads, as compared to just 11% of stay-at-home parents in 1989. That uptick is promising on its own, but becomes even more interesting with further analysis of the reasons given.
In 1989, the vast majority of men who did not work for pay said that it was because of illness or disability, because they were retired, or because they couldn’t find employment. Just 4% said that they were staying home to take care of the house or the family — homemaking, in other words. In 2021, the picture is very different. The share of men who say that they stay home to take care of the house or family is 23%, a nearly 600% increase from 1989. That’s a meaningful change, and it has real consequences.
A Spotlight On Invisible Labor
Men who become stay-at-home parents in order to take on homemaking duties tend to be better educated, married, and slightly older than dads who have other reasons they aren’t working for pay. And many of them may be consciously seeking to alleviate some of the pressure on their partners, while also forming stronger bonds with their children and allowing their partners to seize promising opportunities in their own careers.
In recent reporting from Fortune, several stay-at-home dads described the value of being a bigger part of their children’s lives. They got to spend more time with their kids, develop closer relationships, and also take on more of the invisible load of parenting that customarily falls to women. Two of the dads interviewed specifically mentioned the concerted effort that went into getting schools and daycares to call them first, rather than their wives. It takes time and effort to dismantle assumptions around who plays the role of the “default parent” in a family.
Stronger Families
The rise of the stay-at-home dad parallels a generational surge in active parenting. Dads in 2016 put in three times as much weekly childcare work as dads in 1965, and 2.5 times the household labor, according to CNBC. Fathers, whether they work outside the home or not, are increasingly involved in the day-to-day labor of love that is child rearing. The pandemic may have actually helped accelerate that trend. A report from Harvard’s Graduate School of Education found that during the pandemic, perhaps due to increased time at home with their children, dads experienced closer bonds with their kids. 68% of dads in the study reported feeling closer or much closer to their children, 54% said they were paying more attention to their children’s feelings, and 52% said that their kids were bringing “important” topics to them to discuss.
If the acute togetherness of the pandemic can bring families together, it follows that the growing presence of dads in the domestic sphere will have a similar impact over time. The Pew data shows no sign that the trend is slowing; the share of stay-at-home dads has been consistently trending upwards for decades now. (Occasional spikes in the data tend to represent recessions, which send many parents home from work involuntarily, irrespective of gender.)
A Long Way To Go
Much more work needs to be done to create the conditions for real gender parity in domestic labor, caregiving, and homemaking in the United States. Remote work may be an important factor in creating this progress. Despite the significant setbacks women faced during the pandemic, the sharp pivot towards flexible and remote work had strong measurable impacts on the household division of labor.
A Canadian study of heterosexual partnered parents found that men increased their household work across four out of five categories of household tasks like laundry and shopping during the pandemic. They were also more likely to take on childcare logistics. The study found that men were most likely to make major contributions to these domestic tasks if two conditions were met: 1) the men worked from home or were unemployed, 2) the household was supported by dual earners or by a female single earner.
In other words, when two working parents in a dual-income household both work from home all or part of the time, it creates the conditions for both partners to engage in day-to-day domestic labor. While the uptick in homemaker dads represents a major step forward in how some families think about gender roles and paid and unpaid labor, remote work may be a more promising and realistic path for partnered households where neither party wants to be a full-time homemaker or where the household can’t afford to live on a single income.
As some companies walk back remote work, many parents will continue to resist. After all, families now know what happens when dads step more fully into homemaking roles, full-time or otherwise: household relationships get stronger, invisible work becomes more visible, and the division of labor grows more equitable. That’s all significant progress towards a more balanced future for families. Why would anyone want to turn back the clock?
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