Minjin Chae (Harvard Sociology)

"When Does Gender Trump Flexibility? Workplace Flexibility and Domestic Task Assignment"

Does workplace flexibility reshape expectations about who should perform household and childcare tasks within different-gender couples? Organizations have adopted flexible work arrangements to ease the work-family friction that stalls women's entry and advancement in the workplace. Yet these effects may be limited by resilient gender norms, particularly essentialist beliefs that women and men are suited for different tasks. I theorize task assignment as governed by two competing logics, a practical logic of availability, which allocates tasks to whichever partner can more easily perform them, and a gendered logic of suitability, which codes tasks as women's work or men's work. Drawing on an original survey experiment, I randomly assign whether each partner has a flexible job, ruling out the selection that confounds observational studies. When neither partner has flexibility, respondents assign female-typed tasks to women and male-typed tasks to men. This gendered pattern persists when both partners have flexibility and when only the woman does. Only when the man alone has flexibility do respondents assign him substantially greater responsibility for female-typed tasks, revealing a scope condition under which availability overrides suitability. Thus, policies that deliberately place flexibility with men may be more effective to shift expectations about domestic work than policies that expand flexibility for everyone.