PONE-D-21-13534

Home, sweet home? The impact of working from home on the division of unpaid work during the COVID-19 lockdown

PLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Disslbacher,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. I read it with much interest and the reviewer also enjoyed your paper.

After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process.

In addition ​to reviewer comments, I have some observations.

1. Since your rely on multiple methods to collect interview data (mailing list, twitter, facebook), how does that impact your response rate and sample balance? In Austria, is there any gender difference in twitter and facebook usage? If so, could that affect gender balance in your original sample (N=2,113)? Please add a table in providing the breakdown of data by medium of interview/response and for each, provide % female.

2. Equally, is there similar difference by marital status? If so, did that affect the mix of single individuals and heterosexual couples in your original sample? I also wonder how your data collection method affects your answers given that individuals WfH would be more respective to digital communication and if so whether that inflates the proportion WfH in your data (owing to sample selection bias, since on page 8 you admit the WfH wasn't universal despite govt regulation)?

Again, I am sympathetic to "snowball sampling design" during COVID times. But we'd be open and frank about all the limitations including any systematic bias in sample composition and wherever possible, control for it in regression analysis (akin to "enumerator fixed effects" in face-to-face survey). Alternatively just acknowledge in your data limitation section. 

3. Please describe sample size more clearly. You claim to focus on "730 heterosexual couples (1,460 individuals)" but in table S1, it is adding up to 1377 (687+690) while in Table 1, it is 1159. Final sample size is expected to be stable across all results table. If you did not restrict analysis to a common sample (with non-missing cases), please revise all Tables accordingly. 

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We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

M Niaz Asadullah

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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 Judith Derndorfer, Vanessa Lechinger, Katharina Mader and Eva Six thankfully acknowledge funding from the Vienna Science and Technology Fund (WWTF), grant number COV20-040, and the Chamber of Labour Vienna

grant Multiple Burdens of COVID-19. The funders had no role in study

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Partly

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2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

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3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

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4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

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5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: The paper use the strict lockdown in Austria (which has conservative gender views) to explore the impact of working from home on the gender division of labour, arguing that the lockdown provides a natural experiment. The authors collected their own data through a survey and are very upfront about the limitations of the sample and stress the results are an upper bound. The paper finds that there was not much change in the division of labour and the main mechanism was child care. I think the paper is interesting and the results are of wide interest but I think the paper would need quite a bit of work before it meets the standards for publication, as follows:

1) The authors could provide a better sense of how much more unpaid work women do (globally and specifically to Austria/similar countries) rather than just stating women do more unpaid work

2) Firstly I would like to see much more discussion of the gender bargaining literature, how this paper fits in and a clear theoretical framework

3) I feel it was admirable to collect time use data but I felt these were under-utilised

4) I completely understand the reasons behind not being able to see the change in hours but I find this a big limitation - is there any way to combine the time use data and who does more to get sense of how much the men who do more are really doing? Men could double their unpaid work but if this is from 1 hour to 2 hours this is not much of a change...

5) Do we know how many of the respondents worked from home before the lockdown or had the option to?

6)I'm not sure I fully understand how pre-lockdown division is captured

7)The majority of responses come from women, have you used only those coming from the women as a robustness check i.e excluding those coming from men/both and compared responses when you have information from both partners? I imagine that there may be some disagreement on how does how much between partners (I have seen this in other datasets where division of labour is collected from both partners)

8) I found figures 1-3 quite difficult to interpret, I wonder if there are better ways to represent the descriptives, and draw out the key descriptive results?

9) I would like the discussion of the results to consider more of the magnitude of results and to have a greater understanding of how these results fit into the gender bargaining and division of labour literature. I think the initial discussion is there but could benefit from reference to more literature and theory

10) Would it also help to use the age of the youngest child instead of the number of children as a robustness check - I wonder how important the age of children are in women doing more of the child care? Especially having very young children?

11) I wonder if grocery shopping was appealing as it was an excuse to get out of the house!

12) Note the links to the supplementary material did not work for me so I could not see this

13) I found it quite hard to get to the key results so the authors may want to consider how to restructure the results and discussion to guide the reader to the key findings

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Reviewer #1: No

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Home, sweet home? The impact of working from home on the division of unpaid work during the COVID-19 lockdown

PONE-D-21-13534R1

Dear Dr. Disslbacher,

We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements.

Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication.

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Kind regards,

M Niaz Asadullah

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.

Reviewer #1: All comments have been addressed

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2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

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3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

**********

4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

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5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

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6. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: (No Response)

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7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #1: No