Men’s Childcare Involvement before and during the Great Recession: The Case of Spain (2002-2010)

In the last decades in Western societies the gender wage gap has increasingly being reduced while wage gap among socioeconomic statuses (SES) have followed the opposite pattern. The trends towards the widening/narrowing of gender and SES inequalities in the labor market have been accentuated during the late 2000s and beginning of 2010s, due to the Great Recession. However, little is known about how changes in gender and SES gaps in the labor market during the recessionary period have been translated in a critical dimension for the social reproduction of inequalities: time with children. This study aims to analyze whether the widening/narrowing trends of gender and SES inequalities in paid work have followed a similar pattern in the childcare time before and during the Great Recession, focusing on the fathers’ perspective. To do so I use two waves of the Spanish Time Use Survey carried out before and during the economic recession. I model the data using Ordinary Least Square regressions to see variations over time and across families, and Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition to explore to what extend variations are driven by behavioral or compositional changes. Preliminary results show that, on the one hand, the gender gap is being reduced, especially in the more time-inflexible and physical demanding part of childcare. This change is mainly driven by compositional changes like the rise of amount of fathers out of the labor force with greater availability of time. On the other hand, we find that the gap between high and low educated fathers has not been widened by the Great Recession.