Modern Women Are Just Like Their Mothers

(Bloomberg) -- More women may be leaning in, but they’re still doing most of of the work taking care of the kids.

British women are still responsible for childcare 74% of the time – the same proportion as in the year 2000, according to data released today by the Office for National Statistics.

The needle hasn’t budged even as society has seemed to change in other ways. Sex discrimination cases in the workplace have fallen, and moms are more likely than ever to be the main breadwinner in families. Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg took a two-month paternity leave, while Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer said she would take a few weeks.

The value of unpaid childcare last year in the U.K. was £132.4 billion ($166 billion), compared with the nation’s £1.8 trillion economy, the ONS said.

There are several reasons why women’s share of domestic work hasn’t changed much, despite more women working, said Claire Harding, head of research at the Family and Childcare Trust, a family charity. Access to paid childcare is one difficulty. In 2015, the U.K. introduced a policy that essentially allows parents to split maternity leave, but there’s been slow uptake, she said, citing research by My Family Care, a childcare provider.

“Dad’s working hours go up after they have children,” Harding said.

For 1.9 million families in the U.K., there’s another reason women do the lion’s share of childcare: They’re a single parent. The number of households with one parent has increased 15% since 1996, and 86% of them are headed by a woman.

The main reason, though, is the gender pay gap. “Women earn so much less than men,” Harding said. “It makes financial sense for them to be the ones taking time out of work to look after children.”

In the U.K., the pay gap can be thought of like this: From today through the rest of the year, women are effectively doing unpaid work, according to the Fawcett Society, a women’s rights group.

Dawn Roberts, 61, of Newcastle, England, said that her husband was the breadwinner while she looked after her two children. Now that she has a grandchild of her own, she thought things would be different.

“I didn’t expect it to be 50-50, but I thought it’d have changed a bit in all that time,” she said.

She doesn’t have to look far for an example of a woman taking on a larger portion of the duties. Her daughter, Sharon Newton, 39, is taking time off work while her son is a toddler.

“His employer needed him more, and the work is more reputation-based, so it was just decided he’d be working,” she said.

Still, Newton said she feels that her husband pulls his weight. “We don’t take it in turns, but it seems to even out,” she said. “We end up dividing up the jobs: I’ll do the cooking for our son, and he’ll do the washing up.”

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To contact the editor responsible for this story: Lisa Fleisher at lfleisher2@bloomberg.net, Timothy Coulter