The gender division of housework after the first child: a comparison among Bulgaria, France and the Netherlands

In our study, we adopt a comparative-longitudinal perspective on the gender division of housework before and after the birth of the first child, exploiting the first two waves of the Gender and Generation Survey and comparing three countries belonging to different gender and welfare regimes (i.e. Bulgaria, France and the Netherlands). We find that childrearing everywhere triggers a re-traditionalisation, generating a more inegalitarian gender division of housework, yet with interesting differences across countries. Fixed-effect regression analyses of the pooled data show that changes when becoming parents are less pronounced in France with respect to Bulgaria and the Netherlands, more pronounced when she is low-educated. Moreover, when countries are analysed separately, it emerges that it is only in the Netherlands that traditionalisation around first childbirth is significantly lower in couples where the woman is middle- and high-educated compared to those where she is low-educated. Economic, cultural and institutional contexts do matter. Traditionalisation and within-couples polarisation is weaker in contexts where non-traditional attitudes are widespread, social policies are more defamilialising and more explicitly addressed also to men, and where part-time is not the main reconciliation strategy, as in France.