By leveraging the UK COVID-19 lockdown, this paper examines the impact of changes in paid working hours on gender inequality, specifically time devoted to housework and childcare. We compare potential outcomes of similar couples who only differed in partners’ losing (or maintaining) paid hours during the period from January/February 2020 to April 2020. We draw on wave 9 of the UK Household Longitudinal Study and the first wave of the Understanding Society COVID-19 study to evaluate competing hypotheses derived from time availability, relative resources and ‘doing gender’ perspectives. Following studies on the gendered division of unpaid labour, we also account for heterogeneous implications by analysing couples where partners’ relative contributions to household labour income differ by gender. Our empirical results indicate that both men and women who lost paid hours increased the time devoted to domestic chores, but gender inequality strikes back, especially after breadwinner women lose paid hours. Overall, this paper provides fruitful insights into how theories of gender inequality in the division of domestic tasks could benefit from research on labour market shocks.

通过利用英国COVID-19锁定，本文研究了带薪工作时间的变化对性别不平等的影响，特别是用于做家务和育儿的时间。我们比较了从2020年1月/ 2月到2020年4月的这段时间里，伴侣在失去（或维持）有偿工作时间方面有所不同的类似夫妻的潜在结果。我们借鉴了英国家庭纵向研究的第9轮和《谅解》的第一轮社会COVID-19研究评估了从时间可用性，相对资源和“做性别”观点得出的竞争假设。在对无偿劳动的性别分工进行研究之后，我们还通过分析夫妻之间伴侣对家庭劳动收入的相对贡献因性别而不同的原因来解释异质性含义。我们的经验结果表明，失去带薪工作时间的男女双方都增加了处理家务的时间，但性别不平等现象反击，尤其是养家糊口的妇女失去了带薪工作时间之后。总体而言，本文提供了卓有成效的见解，说明在家庭工作分工中的性别不平等理论如何从劳动力市场冲击的研究中受益。