Childcare in Lithuania and Belarus: How Gendered Is Parenting in Eastern European Countries?

Ausra Maslauskaite , Vytautas Magnus University
Anja Steinbach, University of Duisburg-Essen

Research shows that even though women’s’ and men’s time spend on housework slowly converged over the last decades, the time that mothers and fathers invest in childcare did not change as much. This paper aims to contribute to the literature on childcare focusing on the two neglected Central Eastern European (CEE) countries Lithuania and Belarus, which took very different paths after seceding from the Soviet Union after 1990. We use recent datasets, namely the Families and Inequalities Survey from 2019 for Lithuania and the Generations and Gender Survey 2020 Belarus Wave 1 from 2017. The analytic sample consists of 2,114 mothers and fathers born between 1970 and 1984 with children under the age of 14. Results reveal that in both countries, Lithuania and Belarus, mothers perform more childcare tasks than fathers do and that, in line with the theoretical expectations, gendered parenting is more prominent in Lithuania than in Belarus.

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 Presented in Session P1. Poster Session Fertility, Family and the Life Course