Time use of parents in the United States: What difference did the Great Recession make?

Feminist and institutionalist literature has challenged the "Mancession" narrative of the 2007-09 recession and produced nuanced and gender-aware analyses of the labor market and well-being outcomes of the recession. Using American Time Use Survey (ATUS) data for 2003-12, this paper examines the recession's impact on gendered patterns of time use over the course of the 2003-12 business cycle. We find that the gender disparity in paid and unpaid work hours followed a U-shaped pattern, narrowing during the recession and widening slightly during the jobless recovery. The change in unpaid work disparity was smaller than that in paid work, and was short-lived. Consequently, mothers' total workload increased under the hardships of the Great Recession and declined only slightly during the recovery.