Women still spend more time caring for children compared to men, as evident from the US survey carried out between 2011 and 2021.
Interestingly, while levels of employment affected child care time for both men and women, for men the effect was less pronounced.
One other interesting finding is that the difference between men and women is minimal when both work full-time, suggesting a more equal distribution of duties due to lack of available time.
It is related to sexism. For the purpose of testing whether it’s just mothers trying to save money on babysitters, the linked research breaks parents down into three groups by their employment: unemployed, part-time and full-time workers. In all three, men spend less time with children than women (although in case both parents work full-time, this difference is much smaller).
Accessibility of child care, on its hand, is absolutely an economical issue.
How do you know it’s not an effect of preference?
Is it the position of this community, or your position, that any difference based on sex is sexism and sexism is bad? In this case, that the childcare workload should be 50/50, and any other distribution is wrong? Could 60/40 be acceptable (in either direction) if that maximized some other value, say, life satisfaction, or child development, or even some productivity metric?
The community doesn’t have a position, it consists of different people, mainly united by the idea of combating sexism.
A different distribution, in my opinion, isn’t necessarily bad in and of itself, but may signal of systemic issues within a society - namely, women are expected to prioritize child care higher than men merely by the virtue of being women, and men are not held to a similar standard (which is sexist). This forces women into roles they may not want to play, and at the same time this may affect the child’s development.
I appreciate the leeway to take a different approach here. I’m not generally impressed with studies where the issue is broken down into men do this thing X%, women do this thing Y%. And then everyone just fills in their own preferences as the preferences of their entire gender, and the shit flinging commences.
The key here is centering preferences as the target metric. For example, I found this slightly dated research from Pew
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2013/03/14/chapter-4-how-mothers-and-fathers-spend-their-time/
Which has a section titled, “How do parents feel about their time.” To paraphrase, women are happier with the amount of childcare they do than men. Many men wish they were doing more childcare. But among the small number of parents who wish they did less childcare, there are over twice as many women.
I think getting those distributions to look more similar is a much better target, than trying to equalize the hour balance.
Fair!