Challenging Gender Roles during the COVID-19 Pandemic: The Case of Employed Palestinian-Arab Mothers in Israel

Numerous critiques of the secondary effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on women have emerged, especially regarding the significant weight it added to women’s existing burdens (Carlson et al., 2020; Boca et al., 2021; Sawhill & Guyot, 2020). The closing of schools, childcare centers, and businesses providing domestic services removed an important support system for parents’ participation in the workforce; children were at home, requiring care and education. Additionally, as reported in the US (Collins et al., 2020) and several European countries (Boca et al., 2021; Yaish et al., 2021), women were more likely than men to be laid off or forced to reduce their work hours during the pandemic.

Several long-standing studies about the division of household labor concurred that despite the convergence of the time women and men spent on domestic and care work, most of the housework, particularly the less enjoyable, routine tasks such as cleaning, cooking, and laundry were still being done by women (Bianchi et al., 2012; Miller, 2010). Furthermore, research from countries with more traditional gender cultures showed that increasing men’s family involvement seemed more difficult to achieve (Aassve et al., 2014; Sabbah-Karkabi, 2022).

Extensive research explained that structural and cultural path dependencies played a key role in determining how gender equality was implemented in a couple’s daily life (England, 2010; Evertsson, 2014). Evidence from previous studies assumed that time availability and the couple’s relative resources explained how the bargaining resources affected the household’s arrangements (Bianchi et al., 2012; Evertsson, 2014). The relative resources approach argues that the division of housework takes place as a negotiation between spouses on the absolute measures of earnings, hence, the more an individual earns in absolute terms, the less housework he or she does (e.g., Brines, 1994); while the time availability perspective contends that the division of household labor is allocated according to time spent in market work (e.g., Aassve et al., 2014; Presser, 1994) and the burden on women decreases as the amount of time they spend in paid employment increases. However, empirical findings showed that among couples where both partners were employed, the women still assumed the larger portion of household tasks (Sayer, 2016) leaving these explanations as an insufficient predictor of inequality within families. Additional explanations, such as the gender social structure which suggests that gendered norms about household labor and paid work are powerful. Accumulating empirical evidence revealed that men and women performed the gendered division of family and work responsibilities through everyday social interaction (England, 2010; Sayer, 2016; Thébaud et al., 2021). This showed how men and women do gender (West & Zimmerman, 1987) by concentrating on how they either tried to adhere to or deviated from, the dominant norms on the gender appropriateness of behaviors. However, the doing gender perspective was called into question amid certain structural changes in time availability and resources in the family. Musumeci and his colleagues’ (2015) study on the transition to parenthood in Italy showed that couples constructed less gendered childcare arrangements and adopted undoing gender reactions when unexpected events such as the father’s job loss during the transition to parenthood, or the rejection of the mother’s application for part-time employment occurred (Deutsch, 2007).

Following changing employment arrangements for both men and women during the COVID-19 pandemic, especially for women with young children (Sawhill & Guyot, 2020), a twofold theoretical explanation emerged to understand how the new work arrangements combined the unexpected experience of a lockdown and the associated family challenges and demands (Carlson et al., 2020). One theoretical explanation suggested that these changes might have led to the increased participation of men in family demands, which stimulated the discussion about job flexibility and its association with domestic labor, especially for men. Based on recent research about the association between the fathers’ egalitarian share of childcare responsibilities and parental leave or flexible work (Carlson et al., 2021; Petts & Knoester, 2018), the pandemic may have altered the longstanding assumption about structural barriers due to the lack of family-friendly workplace policies (Pedulla & Thébaud, 2015) and potentially lift some of these barriers due to increased job flexibility as well as access to paid leave. A recent study by Carlson and colleagues (2020) showed that fathers who worked from home spent more time doing housework if their partners were employed full-time. Similarly, studies from England showed that men who contributed to childcare were primarily those who lost their jobs due to COVID-19 and thus spent considerably more time at home (Andrew et al., 2022; Sevilla & Smith, 2020).

However, other studies indicated that despite the evidence that unemployment has been associated with a reallocation of housework to the unemployed spouse, wives tended to show a much larger increase in housework hours than husbands following unemployment (Dernberger & Pepin, 2020; Nitsche & Grunow, 2016) and the increase in men’s time availability at home during the COVID-19 pandemic, did not indicate greater domestic contributions or that the increase was significantly lower than the women. The flexible work arrangements that the pandemic afforded men and women may have contributed to preserving the traditionally gendered allocation of labor by enabling employed women to keep doing the major portions of both housework and care work (Yaish et al., 2021), since men and women utilized flexible work arrangements that were in line with their society’s expectations as well as their preferences, differently (Chung & van der Lippe, 2020). According to Jessen et al. (2021), a German study showed a significant increase in the number of couples where the mother was left with sole responsibility for the care work and that this increase was the highest only when the mother worked from home. In England, Andrew et al. (2022) showed that vast gender asymmetries emerged when one partner stopped working for pay during the crisis: mothers did far more domestic work than fathers in the same situation. Surveys conducted among Jewish families in Israel during the first wave of the pandemic showed similar trends; on average, women’s weekly unpaid domestic work increased by two hours, while men’s contribution decreased by 15 min. This gap was explained by the different allocation of tasks, according to which men were responsible for outside activities (shopping, car maintenance, etc.) that saw a decrease during the pandemic, whereas women took care of the domestic work (cleaning, cooking, etc.) that experienced an increase under COVID-19. Focusing on childcare, the data indicated that women increased their weekly hours spent on childcare more than men in families where the man was fully employed, and the woman was only partially employed. An opposite trend was found in families where spouses both worked full-time or the man was partially employed while the woman was fully employed (Herzberg-Druker et al., 2020). However, these findings cannot be uncritically generalized to diverse cultural contexts where the distribution of housework and childcare in these societies remains associated with gendered roles such as the male breadwinner/female homemaker model. For example, empirical data from Italy showed that most of the additional housework and childcare associated with COVID-19 fell on women, even though childcare activities were more equally shared than housework activities (Boca et al., 2021). Furthermore, the time spent by women on housework, childcare, and assisting their children with distance learning did not depend on their partners’ working arrangements (Boca et al., 2021). A qualitative study among parents in middle-class families from India explored the dynamic underlay of women being overburdened while both parents’ careers became remote. The father’s work-from-home job took on a more official dimension that justified their minimal involvement in household chores and child-rearing, while the mother’s work-from-home job was seen as being dispensable for the sake of care work (Borah Hazarika & Das, 2021).

Processes that appeared in several studies, where unemployed and financially dependent men avoid sharing housework during the pandemic (Calarco et al., 2021; Boca et al., 2021), were often explained as being the result of gender display (Brines, 1994; Greenstein, 2000). They asserted their masculinity by refusing to do housework, and/or women retained responsibility for housework to reduce the gender deviance of their breadwinner status (Gupta, 2007). Given gendered cultural pressures, a study by Calarco and her colleagues (2021) in Indiana found that mothers’ disproportionate labor and unequal parenting were justified and seemed “practical” and “natural.” During the pandemic, these justifications allowed couples to rely on mothers by default rather than through an actual discussion of the issue.

Following this theoretical debate about the ability of the new work arrangements and increased housework and care work to alter gender conventions in the private sphere, this study uncovers the mechanisms that might enhance the partners’ domestic labor sharing or those who prevent the convergence toward gender equality by taking into consideration that these processes do not work independently of social norms and gendered expectations. However, the survey data sets used in the most recent studies neglected the fact that different social and cultural contexts might shape gender norms around paid work and household management differently (Calarco et al., 2021). The current study attempts to expand our knowledge about underrepresented societies in the literature where socioeconomic changes in the realm of education and paid employment among women are occurring, while any change in gender roles and marriage formation remains almost stagnant, and to understand the extent improvements in women’s resources reflected in income and time availability are sufficient to allow for the movement toward gender equality at home. Therefore, studying a society undergoing social change will allow us to improve our knowledge about the role of spousal resources cultural dictates, and the interactions between them. Studying Palestinian-Arab families in Israel fills the gap by revealing women’s perceptions and interpretations of how the structural changes in family-work arrangements altered their family gender roles, as well as identifying the power of social forces underlying gender inequality in a deeply gendered society and those who can challenge it.

The Palestinian-Arab society in Israel, a national minority that constitutes over one-fifth of the Israeli population (ICBS, 2020), has undergone massive social changes over the last two decades, especially in education. The notable change in education has drawn more women into the workforce, especially into female-dominated occupations such as teaching, nursing, and social welfare (Kraus & Yonay, 2017). Nevertheless, the employment rate of Palestinian-Arab women employment remains low and is only 38% substantially lower than that of Palestinian-Arab men and Israeli-Jewish women which is 66% and 64%, respectively (ICBS, 2020). These employment patterns are greatly affected by the prevalence of patriarchal norms that profoundly define family life and restrict women’s occupational opportunities by either preventing them from working outside their homes or relegating them to jobs that prioritize domestic work and childrearing (Abu-Baker, 2003). This is in addition to structural barriers such as limited opportunities in the local labor market due to the segregation of Palestinian-Arab towns and villages which suffer from limited resources, infrastructure, and institutional discrimination (Kraus & Yonay, 2017). Therefore, the lack of job opportunities is one crucial barrier standing in the way of Palestinian-Arab women, especially as they often prefer to find jobs close to home while maintaining their socially accepted role as keepers of the household (Sabbah-Karkabi, 2020).

In recent years, the existing growth opportunities for education, for both men and women, and the increased rates of women’s employment have led to the rise of a new Palestinian middle class. The data show that the middle class consists of 23 – 28% of Palestinian households in Israel, with only 3% defined as upper class and the rest as lower class (Haidar, 2019). However, Haidar (2019) asserted that traditional perceptions continue to exist concurrently with social mobility and changes in the social stratification system and the newly developing middle class is primarily expressed through the adoption of new forms of consumption that have constructed their class identity and places less emphasis on social and cultural characteristics. These processes are reflected by the absence of urbanization, individualism, and maintaining the clan as the individual’s primary institution of affiliation. These processes are mostly shaped by the tensions between their economic-professional mobility and the limited processes of change in their socio-cultural and physical spaces (Haidar, 2019).

Despite the socioeconomic changes that have occurred over the last three generations among Palestinian-Arabs in Israel, traditional gender roles have been preserved. Some researchers have proposed that studying and working outside the home have made Palestinian-Arab women more independent, while others have shown that women principally gained economic power, but not social independence (Author, 2020) and that the masculinity identity is still strongly tied to being the family’s breadwinner (Khoury, 2019).

These contradictory social trends have several implications for the Palestinian-Arab family and its gender roles. Among the younger generation, which tends to believe that spouses must participate equally in both domestic work and decision-making, a contradictory trend was found to exist where actual patterns of behavior do not always match these preferences (Haj-Yahia & Lavee, 2017). Studies focused on spouses’ resources (Author 2020, 2022, 2023) reveal that in households where a Palestinian-Arab woman’s academic education was the same as her spouse’s and she was employed full-time, there was a greater sharing of the fiscal management. While sharing household chores was positively associated with her employment status and her attitudes toward gender roles. A recent quantitative study about the household position in the class stratification system and the division of household tasks found that only upper-class families had a greater propensity to be egalitarian in managing their households (Author, 2022). These results were consistent with a recent qualitative study (Khoury, 2019) focusing on the way middle-class spouses in Palestinian-Arab society in Israel perceive men’s roles in the family, which indicated that the men in the study wanted to adopt an egalitarian division of family roles but still must deal with the criticism of the surrounding society.

Therefore, this study raises the question about the extent the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent economic crisis affected inequality within dual-earner families. Since it began to spread in Israel at the end of February 2020, Israel experienced three closures, employing strict rules to contain the spread of the virus. By mid-March 2020, during the first closure, Israel closed its educational system following the closure of many workplaces. At the same time, many employees moved to work remotely from home (Herzberg-Druker et al., 2020).

The economic effects of the pandemic-induced economic slowdown had a more adverse effect on the Palestinian community than the Jewish community. According to data from the Employment Services in March and April 2020, 32% of Palestinian employees in 2019 were out of work due to the pandemic-induced first economic slowdown, with a significantly lower figure among the Jewish population at 23% (Miaari et al., 2020). While the percentage of Palestinian-Arab women who were out of work was the highest in Israel, after the many closures, their rate of return to the workforce was higher than that of Palestinian-Arab men. The fact that female Palestinian-Arab workers tended to be concentrated in higher-skill sectors (such as teaching and social welfare) may have helped to cushion the impact of gender differences (Miaari et al., 2020).

Palestinian-Arab employed mothers in Israel are of primary interest in this unique situation, where changes in employment patterns affected at least one partner while demand for unpaid work at home increased. Therefore, this study investigates how these structural changes enable an effective shift of the gendered patterns of housework management by raising the following questions: How do Palestinian-Arab women manage the increase in demand for unpaid work and the changing arrangements of paid work? Have the spouses’ changing employment arrangements led to new negotiations within their households to support a more egalitarian division of domestic work? What are the social forces that prevent or facilitate moves toward a more egalitarian division of domestic labor?

This study was based on 28 in-depth, semi-structured interviews inspired by feminist epistemology so that an emphasis could be placed on the importance of including the presentation of women’s voices as sources of knowledge. Women’s voices were conveyed through personal narratives, and testimonies enabling the study to use their own words, rather than those of the researcher (Reinharz, 1993). The data were collected during the first closure in Israel, during March and April 2020. Due to the closure and governmental directives regarding social distancing, the interviews were conducted online by Zoom after the interviewees consented to their participation^{Footnote 1}.

The participants in the study were required to meet two criteria: to be married with at least one child living at home and to be a woman from a dual-earner family; at least until the beginning of the closure. The participants were located using the snowball sample method. Each interview lasted between one and one and a half hours, and the women determined when the interview was conducted with most of them preferring evenings after they finished their caring and household tasks.

The interviews were conducted in two parts. The first part focused on the women’s backgrounds, such as age, years of schooling, employment status, number of children and their ages, and place of residence. The women provided data about the level of their spouse’s education and employment status, before and during the pandemic. The second part relied on semi-structured interview questions that stemmed from the study questions. They referred to the following issues: (1) changes in women’s paid and unpaid roles during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic; (2) changes in spouses’ paid and unpaid roles during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic; (3) women’s perceptions, interpretations and responses to their multiple simultaneous roles during the first closure; (4) decisions made by the couples to resist the new challenges in family demands; and (5) women’s perceptions regarding the pandemic as an opportunity to alter the division of household chores.

The women who participated in this study had an array of experiences and backgrounds. Their mean age was 38.0. One of them had four children, two of them had one child, and the rest had two or three children. The place of residence of most of the women was a Palestinian village or town in central or northern Israel, and only four women were from a mixed Arab-Jewish city in the north. In terms of education, only one of the women had a postsecondary education (post-high school education, either a diploma or certification), and the rest had an academic education (bachelor’s or master’s degree). They worked in professions such as nursing, psychology, education, and social work. All of them were married to spouses with a similar level of education, except for four women who were married to spouses with lower levels of education than theirs (see Table 1).

All interviews were conducted in Arabic, the interviewees’ native language, and were recorded and transcribed and all participants were designated pseudonyms to protect their identity. The recorded interviews were analyzed thematically following Charmaz’s (2006) guidelines for grounded theory. I began to familiarize myself with the interview data by using open and focused coding. The open codes captured broad themes that emerged during the interviews such as changes in the women’s and their spouses’ paid work arrangements during the pandemic, changes in their unpaid roles during the pandemic, and women’s perceptions and feelings about new family-work demands. The paid work code was analyzed to capture various aspects of paid work, such as remote work, being on leave, or continuing to work as before. The unpaid work code captured aspects related to household chores and childcare and the way they were shared by the spouses. The final stage of the analysis involved theoretical coding to uncover the social processes embedded in women’s experiences in both paid and unpaid work so they could become the themes of the study which resulted in the need to combine some of the codes.

The themes presented below shed light on the research questions and help to gain an understanding of the gender structure operating at the micro-level through the household arrangements during the pandemic, the women’s perceptions and feelings about the new family demands and changing employment arrangements, the way they dealt with the household and caring burden and their perception about the way the pandemic period might have altered the gender roles.

Most of the women who participated in the study described a non-egalitarian household pre-pandemic. They offered accounts that justified such arrangements due to their husbands’ long working hours relative to their hours or by pointing to gendered perceptions regarding how household chores were supposed to be divided as being “my specialty,” and “I did not agree with the idea that he should do these tasks.” During the pandemic, most of these arrangements continued despite the changes in the couple’s work arrangements, and the few exceptions were husbands who had already helped with tasks before the lockdown. Rana, a mother of three, and who worked as a nurse, shared her experience:

There was almost no change in the division of household labor… except shopping… I did not sense any real change, although he came home earlier… often he ate lunch and then went to watch TV, so nothing changed.

Similarly, Luna, a mother of two, who worked as a teacher for students with special needs described her feelings and her way of managing the intensification of her workload even though her lawyer husband’s work hours were reduced. In her words:

The whole period was a disaster for me. I had to submit work plans as a teacher of children with special needs since they need a lot of guidance and help with the computer. In my own kids’ school, they exaggerated… My daughter was in first grade, so she needed to learn the basics, and I did everything. The kids constantly asked for food, so I was busy feeding them all day long.

In some cases, the increased availability of men and women at home during the lockdown created an opportunity to negotiate the dynamic around the gendered division of labor. As argued, changes in work circumstances, the increased availability of the men in the house, and a deepening of the burden on the family demands led to the fathers’ exposure to domestic responsibilities (Knoester et al., 2007) which altered their perspectives regarding their family roles. Some interviewees described this as a key factor in the convergence toward an egalitarian division of household tasks.

Suha, a mother of two, who worked as a teacher in an educational center, was unemployed during the closure whereas her spouse now worked fewer hours. She described how changes in the division of household tasks took place:

Before the pandemic I did everything in the house; I took care of homework, prepared food, made sure the kids ate, organized the house before I left for work… During COVID-19 my husband was at home more, so sometimes he joined in and helped me.

Nevertheless, the husband’s presence for longer hours in the house was presented as an opportunity to expose him to the workload that had always fallen on the woman. Some of the women described this exposure as an encouraging factor for change.

Suha described the change in her family since her spouse was at home three days a week, something that had never happened before the pandemic. She said:

He suddenly saw that I worked a lot in the house, and said ‘God help you, you have the household, the kids, and work to take care of’… And then he started doing more at home. At that point, he became responsible for showering the kids.

However, most of the reorganization of the division of household tasks occurred due to the woman’s unavailability of, especially those tasks that should be done or organized. Rania worked as a teacher, so she continued to teach via Zoom, and during her online class, her two daughters also learned via Zoom; “it was his responsibility to help them if they needed it,” she said about her husband who was on unpaid leave.

Hanan, a mother of two girls, described a similar situation. She worked as a bank clerk and was an essential worker during the closure, while her husband reduced his work hours as a lawyer and stayed at home when she went to work. During her absence from home, he took care of their children’s learning on Zoom, and sometimes he prepared lunch for them; “but nothing else,” she said, “despite my repetitive request to keep the house clean after lunch, but it never happened.”

Rania’s words echoed Hannan’s words and described the practical management of the family needs without causing an essential reorganization of the division of household tasks, even where the spouses’ availability was asymmetric. To avoid decreasing the gendered specialization roles, the spouse asked the woman to adjust her job circumstances to meet family demands and to expand her availability.

Zina, a social worker, and a mother of three, continued to be employed during the pandemic as she was an essential worker, while her husband drastically reduced his work hours. She described how she was expected to continue managing the household demands while her spouse was available to help at home:

At the beginning of the closure, both of us were at home, and it was unbearable for me! He behaved like he was on vacation. Then I was defined as an essential worker; I was freed! He stayed at home with the kids… there were a lot of breaking points; sometimes he would call me at work complaining that he couldn’t do it. You could give him one assignment but that was it, so if he needed to prepare breakfast, and take care of the kids, it was too complicated for him. So, I would ask my manager to go home for a bit, since he called me for help… I prepared a quick meal for the kids and went back to work.

She described how one day he asked her to leave her job.

He told me, “I don’t want money” but he wanted me to be at home. I disagreed.

Nora, a mother of two girls, who worked as a nurse, described a similar situation of asymmetry in time availability as her spouse was placed on unpaid leave from work and she continued to be employed as an essential worker. They managed Nora’s unavailability at home by maintaining their gendered division of labor:

At first, he was happy being at home, but he just wanted to sit there without any chores… He wanted me to work night shifts so he would not have to stay alone with the girls during the day. He had no problem being unemployed but did not want to do anything else. So, I had to ask to work night shifts during the week to be with the girls during the day.

These cases reflected the deep implementation of the man’s social role as the main provider in the women’s perceptions: “he was not used to it,” and “he could not handle managing the house alone.”

The transition of men’s work into the home space was described as another aspect of intensifying the workload at home. In a social context, where men are perceived as the main providers and their occupational status is perceived as the family status (Abu-baker, 2003), women are expected to be fully supportive. The interviewees talked about their contribution to allocating appropriate space and time for their spouses’ continuous careers.

Ayat, a lawyer, and a mother of three children, worked remotely, like her husband, who worked as an administrative manager at a health maintenance organization. She managed her working hours simultaneously with her husband’s work, as she said:

While I was working, my kids studied on Zoom. My young son could not manage it on his own, so I asked him to sit with me in my office and helped him while I did my work. Most of my work was done on my laptop while my husband had a lot of Zoom meetings or conference calls, so he had a greater need for space and silence.

Hanaa, a teacher, with three children, and a husband who worked in high-tech had a similar experience. Both moved to work from home during the closure. In addition to supervising her children’s learning on Zoom, preparing meals, and cleaning the house, she made sure her husband could work undisturbed. In her words:

My husband had several Zoom calls a day, so we tried, as much as possible, not to disturb him.

Furthermore, adjusting a woman’s paid work, space, and time, to her spouse’ paid work demands involved creative organizational skills but also came with an emotional and mental price. Reem, a mother of one child, worked in a museum but was on unpaid leave because of the closure, while her husband moved to work from home as a chief sales officer. She described her feelings below:

My husband wanted to work in the dining room, an open space. He could not work in a closed room. Having him working around me was extremely difficult. I had to endure his nervousness, and the phone calls, which were distressing and irritating. I would have preferred to have him work outside the home and given up those moments when he did help me with the kid; at least I would have avoided this headache.

In some cases, the time availability of the spouse because of being on unpaid leave or his work hours having been reduced raised concerns about his role as the main provider, and these worries justified his avoidance of sharing the intensified household demands. These women described how their spouse’s avoidance of sharing household tasks was a way of maintaining their masculine pride, forcing the women to maneuver between home and work and to carry most of the burden.

Riham’s husband was on unpaid leave as a software engineer, and when it lasted over two weeks, he became nervous, she added:

He did not want to help with the housework, and I stopped asking him for help. He was not used to not working for a long time and began worrying about money and his future; he just wanted to sleep all the time.

The cultural value attached to men as the main provider allowed Riham, and other interviewers whose husbands were on unpaid leave, to justify being the primary caregiver despite full-time employment demands. In contrast, women offered a different account when talking about their job loss, as Lama discussed:

I love my job and love earning a good salary but now I am thinking less about whether I have a job, I am missing it less, what I am really missing is finding what makes me happy. Now I understand that it is to be with my kids.

Lama’s words, a mother of three, an occupational therapist, whose job hours were reduced, emphasized gendered caregiving norms to frame the impact of her job loss.

The women who spoke about some sharing of household chores described their spouse’s participation as their own choice or “depending on his mood,” in Lama’s words, whereas they described their completing the housework and childcare tasks because they needed to be done; the option of choosing between which tasks to undertake did not exist. All the interviewees indicated that the men’s participation was mainly in the childcare and shopping domains and those who did participate in household chores chose cooking. The women perceived their spouse’s entering the kitchen as a way of coping with the stressful period or as a hobby that they enjoyed, which was different than how they perceived themselves when doing their housework.

That is what Mona, a mother of three who continued to work during the closure as a teacher said about her husband who was on unpaid leave:

He would cook because he wanted to feel busy during the closure. He also loves to cook, it is his hobby, so he initiated it.

Riham is a mother of three. Both she and her husband were on unpaid leave and voiced similar sentiments:

My husband went from a full-time job to nothing, not even working from home. It was not easy for him, suddenly he did not have anything to do at home. It affected him, so he started hanging out with the kids… He was even making food and baking bread; very unusual for us. I think he wanted to keep himself busy… He also painted the house, and the kids worked with him since he would do whatever kept him busy… After three weeks he started getting bored because he was not used to doing all these things.

However, there was an almost unanimous agreement regarding the fact that the significant change occurred in the realm of childcare, and men who took part in the childcare task made choices within the sub-tasks, such as showering, reading a story, and helping with homework. As Hanaa stated:

I think he did that as an obligation he felt as their father and not to share these tasks with me.

Hala, a teacher for pupils with special needs, continued to go to work while her husband was on unpaid leave. She described a comparable situation when he stayed at home with their two kids:

Even when I was at school, I had to make sure the kids went onto Zoom, they were too young to take care of it by themselves. I was printing the homework for my daughters to do…… I was preparing food, and he only served them breakfast and watched over them when I was at work… All the household chores would be waiting for me to do when I came home.

Hala, like the other interviewees, revealed that the men’s involvement during the pandemic in household demands intersected with the possibility of choosing between the tasks. This produced a gendered hierarchy of caring tasks and has not fundamentally altered the internal logic of the gender roles in the family.

Most of the women agreed that things would return to what they were before but felt that it would probably create new arrangements in the realm of the care-work. Fewer voices viewed the pandemic as an opportunity to alter the gendered division of housework tasks. They attributed this to the fact that the change was only temporary because of the COVID-19 lockdowns and that once the men returned to working long hours the change would disappear. Others thought that it was impossible to alter patriarchal norms over a brief period. Below are three interviewees ’s interpretations of the situation:

Reina, an architect, and a mom of three, was among those who thought that there was an opportunity for change:

We had more cooperation at home, and, in my opinion, this was an extremely favorable change. After eight years of marriage, it is an achievement. I hoped this would continue, but if he returns to working long hours, we may return to the situation that existed before the lockdown. However, I thought that the starting point would be better because I felt that he would participate more at home, while he would also balance out his work hours.

Despite this, most of the women described less optimistic feelings, saying their equitable division of household labor was based on short-term practical constraints. Rana, a mother of three who works as a nurse, felt that after COVID-19 everything would return to how it was before. She believes that the inequality in paid work justifies the maintenance of an unequal division of roles. She said:

It is true that I also worked outside of the house, but if I compare his salary to mine, it is obvious that he worked harder and earned more than me. The bottom line is that we have an extremely comfortable standard of living, I do what I want mainly because of the income he generated, and not due to my income. This is a fact that I have accepted.

Similarly, Hanan, a mother of two who works as a teacher did not expect her husband to be responsible for any of the household tasks because of cultural norms, even though he was currently unemployed. In her words:

We live in a patriarchal society, and doing things differently requires them to change their mindset. Perhaps we made them the way they are therefore, it is challenging to change their ways of thinking and acting. In my home, I never raised this topic for discussion, I would not dare, but maybe others would.

The numerous changes thrust on families while attempting to mitigate the pandemic facilitated an exogenous event that can be leveraged to reexamine and re-discuss the major theories (e.g., relative resources, time availability, gender perspectives) regarding family and work as well as answering key questions about gender inequality in the private ___domain. The results of this study join the main conclusions that were established in recent studies (see Boca et al., 2021; Borah Hazarika & Das, 2021; Calarco et al., 2021; Carlson et al., 2021; Leap et al., 2022) conducted in several societies as the gendered burdens during COVID-19 intensified significantly due to increases in women’s household burdens, and their care responsibilities, meanwhile provided indications about increased involvement of men’s, especially in care work due to their availability at home. However, the results of this study explored situations in which dual-earner families largely continued doing gender regardless of the spouses’ availability at home as well as the social mechanisms underlay the persistence of gendered dynamic within family. This was evident in cases where women continued to be employed and/or where men had increased time availability at home due to changes in their employment circumstances, to partially support theoretical perspectives in understanding the gendered division of labor in Palestinian-Arab families in Israel. The empirical evidence from this study revealed that structural changes, closely intertwined with cultural factors, contributed to the persistence of pronounced gendered aspects of family life. This insight allows for a better understanding of the cultural forces sustaining existing gender inequality and those that might change it, and led to the following conclusions:

The COVID-19 responses dramatically changed the family’s household arrangements; however, the existing gender norms are powerful and deeply inherent in family life. Consequently, Palestinian-Arab women were more easily confronted with the new burdens perceived as a natural expansion of existing domestic roles, whereas men’s participation in the increasing burden remained almost stagnant. This evidence emphasizes the significance of the time availability explanation in understanding the division of labor in dual-earner families and its gendered aspect, as reflected in men’s practices and perceptions. The exceptional cases where men’s time availability led to their sharing household responsibilities, occurred when they expressed positive attitudes toward egalitarian gender roles and involvement in household chores that were usually hindered by workforce arrangements. Most cases where the men did embrace domestic responsibilities, it occurred out of necessity when the balance of time availability between the spouses was disrupted due to unexpected circumstances, such as the woman’s absence from the home as an essential worker, regardless of their gender predispositions. In other instances, men refrained from sharing the tasks despite being available.

Therefore, the answer to the question as to whether the removal of employment barriers altered the gendered division of household tasks, as the time availability theory suggests, was found to be more complex than what had been witnessed in other societies, as the spouse’s time availability intersected with the existing gendered perceptions within the broader cultural context. This complexity was evident in women’s time availability at home revealed an increased burden placed on them, while their partners’ availability occasionally served as trigger for potential change. Such evidence is significant as most of the Palestinian-Arab women participated in the study worked on the frontlines in areas such as health, social welfare, and education, and as such, were defined as essential workers during the lockdown, which in some cases entailed being absent from home. This conclusion addresses the extent to which changing arrangements of employed parents are not predictive of the changes in the spouses’ division of labor, since men and women utilize their time availability differently, as sharing the household chores and care work is not due solely to the fathers’ availability at home. This finding was contrary to most of the existing literature on the reduction of men’s work hours or becoming unemployed that stated that it pushed them toward more involvement in housework demands (Abrefa Busia et al., 2023; Andrew et al., 2022; Sevilla & Smith, 2020).

These conclusions indicate the strength of the gendered social context, where new work-family arrangements occurred, such as the male breadwinner norm, and the perceptions of the woman’s employment status and care work (Brines, 1994). This study reveals that the power of the norm positions men as the primary providers minimizes the capacity of time availability to promote change. This was particularly evident in cases where men became unemployed, leading women to engage in gender display practices to protect the main provider’s identity, even when those arrangements took a toll on their mental health and careers. The strength of the male breadwinner norm was also evident in how men continued to pursue their careers by working from home, exercising control over their time and space. This is in line with Sevilla and Smith (2020) study which showed that the women had to adapt to these new demands by blurring their own career demands and household chores and find new strategies to juggle and balance paid and unpaid work, to justify their spouses’ minimal involvement in the household and caring tasks. The indication of the strength of the gender identities was reflected in the fact that when new caregiving tasks emerged, women felt obligated to fulfill them, often framing these responsibilities as part of their natural social role. These social justifications were part of a mechanism that discouraged men from adopting a more egalitarian division of family demands during the pandemic, even when workplace barriers were removed.

Furthermore, deepening of the gendered aspects of these families was emphasized by the blurred domains created by government regulations and changes in employment arrangements. The findings revealed how a blurring of these lines was utilized differently by men and women. Women were expected to fill the gaps created by the lockdown, including homeschooling (Haney & Barber, 2022), which seemed natural as mothers were socially expected to invest in their children, by adjusting their employment needs to family new demands rather than their husbands’. This often required them to develop organizational skills which led to increased stress and burnout, and in some cases, career disruption. However, the current study uncovered another aspect of blurred domains by providing an environment that was conducive to reopening a discussion of the existing work-family arrangements and the ability of job flexibility to remove some of the pressure that prior to the lockdown maneuvered between the public and private spheres, in a society where they were expected to be the main caregivers and household managers while remain working long hours in the labor market, as Abrefa Busia and his colleagues (2023) described it as the positive side of the blurred domains for employed women in Ghana.

It is important to mention that some couples did establish nontraditional household and parenting arrangements. However, the patterns that emerged in this study highlighted how these arrangements intersected with the gendered power dynamics of choice in the private sphere—a component that is often overlooked or rarely discussed in quantitative research. Findings from this study showed that the movement toward sharing household demands depended on the men’s agreement to share and the power to choose the task they were willing to perform. Men mainly chose childcare and within this area, chose which activities they would carry out and which to avoid. Women described the tasks men chose as pleasurable activities, while they themselves continued to handle whatever was necessary to maintain the family’s normal daily routines. Alongside the sharing practices, the undertaking of childcare tasks, and the ability to choose, had the power to perpetuate a gendered hierarchy of household tasks.

Overall, results of this study suggest that the pandemic exposes the mechanisms underlying the gendered organization of families and emphasizes the importance of the cultural context in understanding the way dual-earner families arranged their households under new work-family arrangements. By doing so, this study indicates the importance of understanding the time availability explanation regarding spouses’ time spent doing household chores and childcare, and the power of their relative resources, as shaped by the broader social and cultural context in which it evolves. This study suggests that the interwoven theoretical discussion contributes to the existing literature by uncovering the gendered organization of dual-earner families in societies experiencing social change such as the Palestinian-Arab society in Israel. This is a society where women have dramatically improved their socioeconomic status over the last decade, however, this improvement was less penetrative of gender roles in the private sphere and produced fewer conditions conducive to negotiating the gendered division of labor. This limits their ability to enhance their social status in the wake of sudden and dramatic changes in family-work arrangements. These findings provide an opportunity to broaden our knowledge about the mechanisms underlying the diverse reorganizations of gendered labor prompted by COVID-19 and reveal the cases that do not align with initial analyses depending on the contexts of the Global North. Consequently, this conclusion is supplemented by qualitative methodology which better captures the diverse experiences of individuals and households as well as the nuanced and evolving meanings associated with gendered labor. This approach addresses the need to expose the broader social power relations that might hinder the processes behind undoing gender (Deutsch, 2007) at the micro level in a less studied context, the Global South (Leap et al., 2022).

Nevertheless, the current study has two main limitations. First, these results describe the immediate dynamics of the pandemic whereas further research is needed to capture longer-term consequences. It is important to assess the extent to which the gender inequality documented in this article persists over time or whether exposing men to workloads that have previously been invisible to them is likely to shift social norms toward greater equality, specifically, in the provision of childcare. Second, this study uncovers women’s narratives and voices whereas men’s viewpoints are less studied in a gendered social context. Adding this element might enable a better understanding of the nature of the gender roles at home and possibly uncover the broader power relations, which facilitate undoing gender or prevent men from adopting more egalitarian gender models occurring in unfamiliar circumstances.

Despite these limitations, this study contains valuable information for policymakers about how new work-family arrangements contribute to shifts in gender equality. There have been increased attempts in the labor market to move toward hybrid jobs and working from home that are becoming more common, blurring the boundaries between work and family demands. This necessitates the creation of systemic solutions for working mothers’ challenges and requires the careful adoption of these arrangements that take into consideration the cultural context under which these work circumstances are taking place, and the multiple dimensions of inequality, especially the access to affordable childcare, which is a less common occurrence in Palestinian-Arab communities in Israel.