The Remote Work Boom Did Fuck-All For Feminism

This just in from the Bureau of Labor Statistics: Men working at home doesn't translate into men doing more housework.

Don’t kid yourself that the remote-work boom is prompting men to pick up more of the housework.

Fully 34 percent of full-time workers did some or all of their work at home in 2022, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ just-released annual American Time Use Survey. That’s down from 38 percent in 2021, but still much higher than 24 percent in 2019, before the Covid pandemic. Time spent working at home on a given day averaged 5.4 hours, compared to 3.3 hours BC (i.e., Before Covid).

The trend is more pronounced for workers aged 25 and over who possess a college or advanced degree. Fifty-four percent of college graduates did some or all of their work at home in 2022, compared to 42 percent BC. Among the bourgeoisie, remote work has gone in four short years from being a quirk to being the norm. Assuming that you, like most Backbencher readers, are a malingering brainworker, in all likelihood you’re reading this post at home.

There’s some predictable disparity between the proportion of men (28 percent) versus women (41 percent) likely to be working from home on any given day. But the disparity is much wider between the proportion of men who perform housework such as cleaning or laundry on an average day (22 percent) versus the proportion of women who do so (47 percent). This disparity is virtually identical to the imbalance BC, when 22 percent of men and 46 percent of women performed housework on an average day. More guys being at home during the day has not translated into more guys doing the laundry or mopping the floor, whereas more women being at home during the day has translated into ever-so-slightly more women doing the laundry or mopping the floor. Men are furnishing a smidgen more childcare, but it doesn’t seem to have lightened women’s load. In households with a child under 6, men are contributing 31 minutes (versus 27 minutes in 2019). Women, meanwhile, are still contributing the same 1.1 hours they did BC.

The housework disparity narrows somewhat when “housework” is defined more broadly to include cooking, lawn care, and paying bills (70 percent of men and 85 percent of women). But men still devote less time to these chores than women (2.2 hours versus 2.7 hours). More to the point, these numbers are virtually unchanged since those now-seemingly-distant days when everybody worked at the office.

What the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild identified back in 1989 as The Second Shift is alive and well. It persisted after the man stopped donning a gray-flannel suit. It persisted after the man stopped expecting the little woman to have his smoking jacket and his slippers and a martini and the evening paper waiting for him when he got home. Now it persists when the man no longer rides the subway or bus or commuter train, or drives the interstate, into the big city to bring home the bacon. It persists when, instead of going to the office, the husband does his job from his computer at home—just the same, in all likelihood, as his wife does.