Ricerc@Sapienza

The paper focuses on gender inequalities both in housework and in labour market in Italy. We will first give a brief review on the previous literature with reference to Italy (Section 1) and illustrate trends in housework in Italy over the years (Section 2). Then, we will recall the main sociological and economic theoretical approaches explaining gender inequality in family work (Section 3).

Is the economic crisis reducing time for paid work? How do Italians use their eventual forgone market-working hours? Is household production increasing its relevance as a market-substitute in times of economic hardship? Is the economic crisis affecting negatively gender equality and favouring a return of backward-looking gender contracts? This paper stems on Italian time use data for three years before, during and after the beginning of the economic hardship (2002/3, 2008/9 and 2013/4) to answer these questions.

This article builds on time use micro-data for Italy to analyse the evolution of individuals’ time allocation during the 2002–2014 period, with a gender-specific focus. We are particularly interested in comparing changes that occurred between the years prior to and after the onset of the recent economic crisis. We use regression analysis to measure differences between years in the average use of time of men and women for personal care, education, paid work, unpaid work, and leisure over the considered period(s).

We use data from the latest edition of the Italian Time Use Survey (2013-2014) and select a subsample of mothers and fathers of children aged up to 14 years to measure gender differences in parents’ subjective perception of childcare time. Based on childcare episodes’ enjoyment scores, we build a dichotomous indicator of unpleasantness and use it as dependent variable in a logistic model. Our explicative variables are gender, multitasking (i.e. presence of housework as parallel activity) and the presence of another adult.