How same-sex parents divide work and childcare

Research by Penn sociologist Pilar Gonalons-Pons and others has shown that after a man and a woman have a child, the couple’s relative share of paid and unpaid labor tends to change dramatically, with the father specializing in paid work and the mother in childcare.

But Emily Curran, a rising fifth-year Ph.D. student in sociology and demography, wanted to know: How does parenthood shape work specialization among male and female same-sex couples in the United States, and what explains any differences?

Understanding this matters, she says, because the way couples divide their labor has important consequences for inequality. Additionally, she notes that the number of same-sex couple households has grown from just over half a million in 2008 to 1.2 million in 2021, according to U.S. Census Bureau data.

Using cross-sectional data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, Curran examines these issues in a working paper, which won Penn’s biennial Etienne van de Walle Prize for best graduate student paper in demography and the Department of Sociology’s Outstanding Graduate Student Paper Award, in addition to honorable mentions from the American Sociological Association.

Curran refers to the way that parents divide their labor as the “parenthood penalty,” and she found that female same-sex couples specialize less than different-sex couples. But these patterns are not due to the absence of a different-sex partner, as Curran found few differences in specialization between male same-sex couples and different-sex couples.

Rather, she shows how gender dynamics within male same-sex couples can generate inequality due to societal expectations of masculinity and notions of men as dominant.

“In all, my findings suggest that couples exhibit greater equality in paid work at parenthood when they are less organized by dynamics that align one partner more closely with the gendered expectations and hierarchical advantages associated with masculinity,” she writes in her paper. Curran found this by using each partner’s occupation as a proxy for their gender signals and identifying couples with “masculine-feminine” dynamics.

For example, one partner may have a job that is socially signaled as more feminine, such as a nurse or teacher, while another has a job viewed as more masculine, such as a truck driver or mechanic. Curran found that male same-sex couples with differently gendered jobs specialize more than those with similarly masculinized or feminized occupations—but this finding did not hold true for female same-sex couples.

She also found that specialization is driven by gender rather than economics: It’s not simply that one partner is opting to stay home because their earnings were lower. Previous studies have found that even when women in different-sex couples are earning more than their partner before parenthood, they are more likely to reduce their paid work. Additionally, Curran finds that partners in a same-sex couple tend to have larger gaps in both age and educational attainment than those in a different-sex couple, and an economic explanation suggests this would make them more likely to specialize, not less.

“This is really important because it implies that parenthood penalties are not necessarily a consequence of parenthood in and of itself but instead about the gendered conditions and environment,” she says. “These findings challenge assumptions that specialization is an inevitable consequence of increased caregiving responsibilities.”