Gendered divisions of work and the economic crisis in Spain

The literature shows that a partner becoming unemployed leads to a reallocation of domestic work towards the newly unemployed partner, but that this reallocation remains gendered. In this paper, we explore the relationship between employment status and the division of domestic work before and after the 2007 economic crisis in Spain in order to test whether unemployment affects the division of unpaid work differently during a recession. The economic crisis of 2007 had a dramatic impact on Spain: the unemployment rate rose from 9 percent in 2006 to 20 percent in 2010. We hypothesize that a crisis can alter the meaning and perception of unemployment. We analyze Spanish time-use data pre-crisis (2003) and during the crisis (2010). Our results show that employment status affects unpaid work in a gendered way, but we find little support for a differential effect of the crisis.