This study investigates two concurrent trends across Europe and North America: the increasing instability of parental unions and men’s rising contributions to household work. Because children have almost universally resided with their mothers and it is difficult for non-residential fathers to maintain any levels of care work, union dissolutions have potentially slowed societal increases in gender equality. A new family form—50/50 living arrangements—has begun to challenge our understanding of the consequences of union dissolution. Since 50/50 residence requires fathers to take full care responsibility for the child half of the time—something few partnered fathers do—it may even push parents into a more egalitarian division of care work. We have studied care work using Swedish administrative data on parents’ leave from work to care for a sick child. We have created a panel of leave-sharing for children aged 2–11, and use an event-study design to estimate the causal effect of dissolution on the sharing of sick-child leave. The results show that in parental unions dissolving today, the dissolution leads to an increase in fathers’ share of sick-child leave. Whereas union dissolutions have for decades been slowing the gender revolution in Sweden, they are now accelerating it.

中文翻译：

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父母工会解散和性别革命


这项研究调查了欧洲和北美的两个同时存在的趋势：父母工会日益不稳定和男性对家务劳动的贡献不断增加。由于孩子几乎普遍与母亲同住，而非同住父亲很难维持一定程度的护理工作，因此工会解散可能会减缓性别平等的社会进步。一种新的家庭形式——50/50的生活安排——已经开始挑战我们对解散工会后果的理解。由于 50/50 的居住要求父亲在一半的时间里承担起对孩子的全部照顾责任——很少有伙伴父亲这样做——这甚至可能迫使父母在照顾工作上进行更加平等的划分。我们利用瑞典关于父母请假照顾生病孩子的行政数据来研究护理工作。我们为 2 至 11 岁的儿童创建了一个共享休假小组，并使用事件研究设计来估计解散对共享病假的因果影响。结果表明，在如今解散的父母工会中，解散导致父亲享受病假的比例增加。几十年来，工会解散一直在减缓瑞典的性别革命，但现在却在加速这一过程。