Who is Picking Up The Slack at Home During COVID?

I have been writing about the impact of COVID on Working Moms. In addition to focusing on causes of stress, I have found that moms are doing more of the work in helping their children who are “distance learners” and spending more time with pre-school age children. In this post, I am going to focus on other domestic chores.

I surveyed both working moms within my extended networks (authors’ network), as well as general population moms. It’s clear that the moms who are part of my extended network can afford to have more help at home. 2 in 3 have some type of housecleaning help (vs. only one in four of general population moms). However, less than 10% are using their house cleaners during COVID. (I hope that the majority are still paying any domestic helpers, but did not ask this question).

In addition to taking care of trying to work with children who are underfoot and eating their parents out of house and home, 6 in 10 working moms within my network and 1 in 6 general population moms are now doing without outside housekeeping help.

I also asked about gardening help. These numbers are not as extreme. About half of moms within my extended network have gardening help and about half of those still have their gardeners working. NOTE: This survey was fielded at a time when gardeners were not supposed to be working in our county. I saw many lively discussions on Nextdoor about which neighbors were scofflaws in this regard. Since then, gardeners have been allowed to resume work locally, though laws differ by state and county. One in four general population moms have gardening help and about 12% are still utilizing this help.

Who is Managing Domestic Duties?

When it comes to spouses sharing household responsibilities, there were no significant differences between the general population moms and the moms from within my extended network. In two-thirds of households, working moms are managing more of the shopping, and 3 in 4 are managing the cooking and the cleaning. NOTE: I did not give an option for ‘we split this fifty-fifty’ and a few moms wrote in that they are trading off duties with their partners. This is consistent with other research that shows that women are more likely to take on domestic tasks.

How did my house get so messy?

In an earlier post, I wrote about my surprise that stress levels for working moms were similar across segments. This was true regardless of whether moms were considered essential workers or not, or reported being under more versus less financial stress. The share of housework managed by spouses doesn’t demonstrate any differences that might give authors’ network moms more stress; their spouses are neither more nor less helpful than spouses of general population moms. Is there any explanation in the data that might help us understand the bafflingly-equal levels of stress?

If I ever did, I no longer take for granted the amazing woman I’ve paid to clean my house once every 14 days for the past decade. Perhaps the difference in levels of housework added by COVID-19 restriction helps to explain why moms of different backgrounds seem to have equal stress levels. While moms from the authors’ network lack many of the stress factors affecting general population moms, a healthy slice of moms from my network are suddenly without the housekeeping help they formerly enjoyed. Though it’s very much a first-world problem that less well-off working moms might envy, stress is stress.