Work from home has boomed since the Covid pandemic. This column uses a vignette experiment to explore how working from home links to gendered attitudes about household work and childcare in Netherlands. When presented with various routine and emergency chores, survey respondents agree, on average, that the partner working from home should execute them. The extent of agreement is significantly larger when the vignette randomly depicts a man, rather than a woman, working from home, indicating that work from home may blast rather than boost gender norms around household work and childcare.
Work from home (WFH) has boomed since the Covid pandemic and has structurally transformed the labour market (Aksoy et al. 2024, Autor and Reynolds 2020, Barrero et al. 2021, Eurofound 2023), with one in every three workers working hybrid nowadays. The economic literature on WFH is growing (Bloom et al. 2024, De Fraia et al. 2025). Yet, we know little about the effect of WFH on attitudes to household work and childcare, which are key drivers of gender inequality and, possibly, fertility declines (Doepke et al. 2022, Folbre 1994, Goldin 2021). Using an experimental vignette design, in a recent study (Kotsadam et al. 2025) we investigate how WFH links to gendered expectations about performing household work and childcare.
In our survey experiment, we provide respondents with a short description (‘vignette’) of a hypothetical dual-earner, same-earnings, same-commute heterosexual couple, where the main character is randomly assigned to be either the female or the male partner. We sketch the situation that certain chores (e.g. picking up a sick child from school) need to be done and ask respondents whether the main character should perform these chores, using a Likert scale. In the first vignette scenario, both partners work at the employer’s premises, while in the other vignettes, one of the partners works hybrid (a couple of days per week from home).
The vignette experimental setup removes key concerns that complicate the interpretation of observational data. A first concern is selection, both into occupations and into the use of remote work. For instance, individuals who anticipate carrying a larger share of domestic responsibilities, or who place a higher value on flexibility, may disproportionately sort into jobs that allow working from home. In this case, the observed variation in time-use attitudes would partly reflect sorting rather than the effect of remote work itself. Our experiment mitigates this concern by administering the vignette to a representative population sample of working-age respondents, irrespective of their own working arrangements, randomly assigning the gender of the partner described as the main character in the vignette, and whether they work from home.
A second concern is the measurement of attitudes to household work and childcare, which are difficult to measure because of social desirability. By presenting all respondents with identical scenarios and randomly varying only the gender of the main character and whether they work from home, the vignette design aims at isolating the relation between work from home and attitudes about household responsibilities from both self-selection and reporting bias.
Does work from home reinforce gendered expectations about who should perform household work and childcare?
Our vignette study was implemented by means of a short online survey conducted in March-April 2025 with close to 4,000 working-age respondents from a representative sample of the Dutch population participating in the Longitudinal Internet Studies for the Social Sciences (LISS), run by Centerdata in Tilburg, the Netherlands.
Figure 1 plots the answer distributions to the vignette questions with 95% confidence intervals, distinguishing both the gender of the main character in the vignette and the gender of the survey respondent. The vignette results show that, on average, men and women who work from home are expected to perform routine household chores and childcare, as well as dealing with related emergency situations. In particular, these expectations are 10-14% (0.3-0.46 of a standard deviation) larger when the person working from home is a man rather than a woman, suggesting that work from home blurs the traditional gendered allocation of paid and unpaid work responsibilities.
Figure 1 Results of the vignette experiment, depending on the gender of the main character (“protagonist”) and the gender of the survey respondent
In contrast, the survey responses do not vary with the gender of the main character, when no one works from home, in the first scenario. Specifically, when asked whether the partner working from home should perform a routine household work task (cooking dinner, in vignette 2, Figure 1), the vast majority of respondents agree on that; and the extent of this agreement is significantly larger when the person working from home is a man rather than a woman. In contrast, when none of the partners worked from home, respondents agreed that partners should equally share the routine task (cooking dinner, in vignette 1, Figure 1), and the extent of the agreement does not vary with the gender of the person working from home.
When informed that the partner working from home collects the couple’s child from school (vignette 3 in Figure 1), most respondents still agree that they should also perform the other routine task, and the extent of the agreement is significantly larger when the male partner rather than the female partner is described as working from home. If there is an emergency situation, such as the school calling to say that the child is sick and should be collected (vignette 4 in Figure 1), again the vast majority of respondents feel that the partner working from home should deal with the emergency. The intensity of agreement is again significantly stronger when the main character in the vignette working from home is a man rather than a woman. As far as the typical masculine task depicted of collecting the car from the garage goes, when the garage calls that the car is ready (vignette 5 in Figure 1), survey participants expect the partner working from home to collect the car, and here the extent of the agreement is even stronger than in vignettes 2-4 when the main character is a man, in line with traditional gender stereotypes that taking care of the car is a masculine task.
We conclude that respondents expect people, and especially men, who are working from home to take on board significantly more household chores than those working at their employer’s premises. Therefore, the experimental evidence gathered suggests that working from home may ‘blast’ rather than ‘boost’ the traditional norms around the gendered allocation of household work and childcare.
The unequal attitudes to the allocation of unpaid work between men and women have far-reaching consequences for gender equality in the labour market, family wellbeing, and possibly fertility (Doepke et al. 2022, Folbre 1994, Goldin 2021). By documenting how working from home links to gender norms about who is deemed responsible for doing the household work, our study provides evidence on a new mechanism through which new work arrangements could influence demographic and economic outcomes. If the untraditional expectations about men working from home (i.e. also performing household tasks) we identify translate into actual behavioural changes, hybrid work could thus support both gender equality and family stability.
At the same time, the broader implications for inequality must be acknowledged. Work from home is disproportionately concentrated among higher-educated, white-collar workers (Autor and Reynolds 2020, Barrero et al. 2021), and its benefits – including greater flexibility and more egalitarian domestic norms – may therefore accrue primarily to privileged households. As Autor and others have shown, the diffusion of remote work risks widening societal divides between those whose jobs can be done from home and those whose jobs cannot. Hence, while work from home may rebalance gender roles within households that can adopt it, it may simultaneously exacerbate inequality across households and social groups.
Source : VOXeu
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