Japan: WFH Boost Fathers' Household Chores & Family Engagement
A 2024 study (Working from home leads to more family-oriented men by Chihiro Inoue, Yusuke Ishihata, and Shintaro Yamaguchi) finds that working from home (WFH) during the COVID-19 pandemic led married fathers in Japan to do more housework, spend more time with family, and become more life-oriented, without reducing their work productivity.
Why it matters
Japan has some of the most unequal divisions of household labor among developed countries. This research suggests that WFH could be a powerful tool to advance gender equality, especially in contexts with entrenched traditional gender roles.
By the numbers:
An extra WFH day per week increased men's time spent on housework by 6.2% and time with family by 5.6%.
It also raised the share of men who viewed life as more important than work by 11.6%.
The fraction of couples where the husband increased his share of housework rose by 9.3% per additional WFH day.
WFH effectively reduced commute times but had no significant impact on work hours or self-reported productivity.
The big picture
In Japan's labor market, lifetime employment with a seniority wage system remains the norm. Those who start careers in nonstandard jobs, especially men, face economic instability that makes it harder to form families.
Combined with strong expectations for men to be breadwinners and women homemakers, men's employment uncertainty is particularly detrimental to marriage and fertility.
Under the hood
The data came from a survey conducted in December 2020 by the Cabinet Office of Japan with around 10,000 respondents. The analysis focused on a subsample of 984 married male workers with children under 18.
The researchers leveraged individual variation in WFH feasibility before the pandemic as an instrumental variable to estimate causal effects, avoiding potential bias from self-selection into WFH.
This allowed them to isolate the impacts of WFH from other pandemic-related changes in attitudes and behaviors.
Robustness checks showed the results were not driven by regional differences in COVID-19 spread, industry characteristics, spouse's WFH status, or self-reporting bias. Using alternative occupation-based WFH feasibility measures as instruments yielded similar findings.
Interesting Details
Subsample analysis revealed stronger WFH effects for fathers under 45, those with preschool children, and the university-educated.
This suggests that childcare time increases more than other household chores and that WFH enables higher-skilled men to better balance work and family.
There was no significant difference in WFH effects on family engagement between men whose wives were stay-at-home vs. working away from home, which contrasts with some previous studies.
Between the lines
Despite Japan's relatively lax lockdown, an estimated 87% of the decrease in commute times arose from WFH. The researchers say Japan's lifetime employment norms penalizing job changes make it a prime case study for WFH's potential to reduce gender inequality in countries facing rising job instability and falling fertility and where men still hold primary economic responsibilities. Enabling fathers to work from home, when feasible, could have society-wide benefits by promoting a more equal division of household labor and shifting attitudes about work-life balance - key ingredients for closing gender gaps at home and raising fertility rates.