‘I leave most of the decisions up to her:’ Gendered parenting, un/equal decision work, and responsibility for COVID-19 vaccination

Vaccination scholarship focuses on how privilege, individualized choice and ‘intensive’ and ‘natural’ parenthood – often motherhood – lead people to delay or not vaccinate their children. Recently, examining parents’ vaccination responsibilities – and the inequalities in paid employment and unpaid care work underpinning them – has become important to understand COVID-19. This article asks who makes vaccination decisions for their children under the age of five, what COVID-19 vaccine decisions are made and how these decisions are gendered. We draw on interviews with 18 Western Australian heterosexual parents. Tracking the responsibilization of mothers and fathers, we contribute a gendered analysis of vaccine ‘decision work.’ We note that norms of intensive parenting led parents to accept or reject vaccines. Like women, men can engage in and support intensive parenting – especially where vaccines are new or widely discussed, or men are available for care work. Overall, we find some potential for children's COVID-19 vaccination to produce more responsibilized fathers and mothers.