"When Does Gender Trump Flexibility? Workplace Flexibility and Domestic Task Assignment"
This paper examines whether workplace flexibility reshapes expectations about who should perform household and childcare tasks within different-gender couples. Organizations have widely adopted flexible work arrangements to ease the friction between professional and private responsibilities that stalls women’s entry and advancement in the workplace. Yet the expected effects may be limited by the resilience of gender norms, in particular the essentialist belief that women and men are inherently suited for different tasks. The efficacy of flexibility policies has been difficult to test with observational data, however, because workers who hold flexible jobs already differ from those who do not. I address this gap using an original survey experiment with a demographically representative sample of 1,200 U.S. adults, which gains causal traction by randomly assigning respondents to read about hypothetical couples in which neither partner, both partners, only the man, or only the woman holds workplace flexibility. Respondents then allocate main responsibility for ten domestic tasks, including female-typed (meal preparation, caring for a sick kid), male-typed (auto repairs, home maintenance), and gender-neutral tasks (picking up kids). The results show that gendered assignments persist even when workers have access to flexible work arrangements. Despite being sticky, gender norms are not deterministic. When only the man has flexibility, respondents expect him to assume substantially greater responsibility for female-typed tasks. Taken together, even when organizations provide the structural resource of flexibility, domestic responsibilities are not automatically redistributed but remain heavily shaped by gender-typing of each task. Policies that deliberately place flexibility with men may do more to shift norms than policies that expand flexibility for everyone.
LOCATION:WJH 1550 STATUS:CONFIRMED DTSTART:20260930T200000Z DTEND:20260930T213000Z END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR