Fathers with college degrees and children who are 5 or younger have decreased their work hours by more than six a week while increasing their time spent on childcare and housework by more than four hours a week, according to a recent paper from the American Institute for Boys and Men.
Seven things to know:
1. The paper, written by research fellow Ariel Binder, PhD, and supported by the institute’s employment and family research program, used data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Current Population Survey and American Time Use Survey, comparing 2017-19 to 2022-24.
The paper focuses on several groups: all prime-age adults, then partnered couples broadly (referred to as husbands and wives), then partnered couples with a child 5 or younger (referred to as young fathers and mothers) and young parents split by college status. The paper uses IPUMS data to include all cohabitating couples, not just those legally married. The convergence in time use shows up at each level but is most pronounced among college-educated young fathers.
2. Healthcare is one of the sectors the paper identifies as growing post-pandemic, alongside other personal services, construction and transportation. Meanwhile, industries with strong male workforces have been cutting jobs, The Wall Street Journal reported May 25.
Healthcare organizations have remained female-dominated in entry-level roles but male-dominated in executive leadership, with women composing only 35% of C-suite leaders in 2024, according to a McKinsey report.
3. The husband-wife gap in weekly hours of paid work declined by 4.3 on a pre-pandemic base of 14.7, a 29.3% decrease. Of that, 3.2 hours came from husbands’ decreases in paid work and 1.1 from wives’ increases.
4. Unpartnered men and women showed only modest, similar declines in paid work hours pre- and post-pandemic, pointing to the shift happening inside households.
5. The gender gap in housework among young parents fell from 18.6 to 14.8 hours, a 20.5% decrease, driven almost entirely by fathers. Young fathers fully offset reduced paid work with more housework, while men without young kids took more leisure instead. The increase was not just childcare — more of it came from general household tasks, a 2.4-hour convergence, than active childcare, a 1.6-hour convergence.
6. College-educated fathers’ weekly paid work hours dropped by about six and their housework rose by about 4.4. Their remote work incidence jumped from roughly 11% to 36.9% of days, compared to 17.7% for non-college-educated fathers.
7. Sectoral reallocation and remote work account for about 44% of the shrinking college-noncollege gap among fathers, but almost none of the aggregate change in husbands’ or fathers’ time use. Remote work itself had only modest effects on men’s hours, at -1.62 weekly hours in the full partnered sample. The author suggests the remaining change may reflect a shift in fatherhood roles and labor supply factors.
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