Housework and Parenting Time in France: What Changed over 25 Years?

If the gap between women’s and men’s housework time narrows, has domestic labor become more equal? Clara Champagne, Ariane Pailhé and Anne Solaz ask what produced that change in France between 1985 and 2010. Their answer distinguishes women doing less housework from men taking on more, and routine household tasks from time explicitly devoted to children. The distinction makes “progress” a question to investigate rather than a conclusion drawn from one average.

Three surveys, different kinds of work

Published in 2015, the study compares the 1985, 1998 and 2010 waves of Insee’s time-use surveys. Its main analysis covers people aged 18–60 in metropolitan France, with or without partners. Parenting time concerns respondents living with a minor child; within-couple comparisons use couples in which both partners completed an activity diary. These are repeated cross-sections, not the same households followed for 25 years.

Diaries record the day’s activities, allowing the researchers to distinguish cooking, cleaning, laundry and shopping from childcare, homework help, play and child-related travel. Their housework measure also includes activities such as gardening and DIY. They examine averages, distributions and differences within couples, then use decomposition models to distinguish changes in observed population characteristics from the remaining change. The French article and its methodological boxes explain these boundaries.

A smaller gap, without a general transfer to men

Across the main sample, women’s daily housework time fell by 69 minutes between 1985 and 2010; men’s fell by nine minutes. Women still averaged 183 minutes a day in 2010, compared with men’s 105. This convergence therefore came chiefly from women reducing housework, rather than men absorbing the work they stopped doing.

Parenting developed differently. Time explicitly spent on children rose for both women and men, and fathers recording no parental activity on the survey day became less common. This is meaningful change, but greater paternal involvement does not imply equal responsibility for every household task. The paper also finds variation across couples and across the distribution of women’s workloads; one average cannot describe every household.

The decomposition associates much of the fall in women’s housework with changed practices beyond shifts in employment and family composition. The authors discuss relaxed domestic standards and outsourcing. Crucially, a model’s unexplained component is not a direct causal measurement of changing gender norms. For readers, the finding opens a further question: when household work declines, was it shared, abandoned, reorganized or transferred to a paid worker?

What a diary cannot count

The study uses activities reported as primary. It explicitly excludes the mental organization of children’s schedules and does not count passive childcare, such as supervising a child while cooking, as separate parenting time. A comparison of minutes therefore leaves part of responsibility invisible. This limitation matters when visible participation is taken as proof that the burden of anticipating and coordinating needs has become equal.

Pair the paper with Hirata’s analysis of care labor and AWID on domestic workers’ rights to follow responsibility beyond the couple. Brazil’s gender statistics provide another empirical setting, but their weekly care-and-housework measure differs from these diaries. The two sources help formulate comparative questions; their numbers should not be treated as a ready-made ranking of countries.