Disrupted Routines: Natural Disasters and the Gendered Allocation of Household Work in the United States

Abstract A large literature documents the consequences of U.S. disasters for migration, wealth, employment, and health, but has largely treated the household as an undifferentiated unit, leaving open how the work of getting through a disaster is distributed among the people inside it. We address this by linking county-level hazard data from the Spatial Hazard Events and Losses Database for the United States (SHELDUS) to American Time Use Survey (ATUS) time diaries for married women and men, 2003–2021, and comparing daily unpaid household work in counties that experienced a high-fatality disaster with counties that did not. Married women in affected counties report approximately 18.5 fewer daily minutes of unpaid work, concentrated in housework and childcare, while married men’s unpaid work is statistically unchanged and their housework rises by about 8 minutes. A pooled interaction model confirms the gender difference is statistically significant. With only 6 of 47 state clusters treated, the women’s estimate survives a wild cluster bootstrap and randomization inference; the pooled estimate is less robust. The 68-minute baseline gender gap narrows by roughly 20 minutes, or about 30 percent, and the effect does not persist into the following year. Men also lose substantially more paid work time than women. Disasters therefore reorganize household time in gender-specific ways, with implications for how recovery and relief programs are designed.