printBarriers to Involved Fatherhood:
Determinants of Parental Labor Distribution in Russian Families
Moiseeva A.A.
Master’s student, Research Intern, Centre for Modern Childhood Research, Institute of Education, HSE University, Moscow, Russia mn_0911@mail.ru
Voronina N.D.
Analyst, Centre for Well-being and Time Use Research, Institute for Social Policy, Senior Lecturer, Department of Sociological Research Methods, School of Sociology, Faculty of Social Sciences, HSE University, Moscow, Russia nvoronina@hse.ru
This research is supported by the Faculty of Social Sciences, HSE University. The article was prepared by the world-class Human Capital Multidisciplinary Research Center under the a grant provided by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation.
Moiseeva A.A., Voronina N.D. Barriers to Involved Fatherhood: Determinants of Parental Labor Distribution in Russian Families. Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya [Sociological Studies]. 2026. No 3. P. 74-88
This article examines the complex relationship between the relative income shares of parents in nuclear families and the time allocated to parental labor in the Russian context. Drawing on contemporary sociological and economic frameworks, the study investigates whether a shift in economic resources within a couple leads to a more balanced distribution of childcare responsibilities. In addition to primary income dynamics, the research accounts for a comprehensive set of determinants, including parental characteristics such as gender, age, educational attainment, employment status, and disability. It also incorporates child-related factors, including the total number of children in the household, the age of the youngest child, and child disability status, alongside macro-level variables like average household income per member, settlement type, and the distinction between weekdays and weekends.The empirical analysis is based on microdata from the 2019 Comprehensive Observation of Living Conditions (VNFSV) conducted by Rosstat. This dataset is particularly robust as it utilizes the time-diary method, which minimizes recall bias and ensures high precision in estimating actual daily time budgets. The findings reveal that a woman’s economic resources exert only a limited influence on the division of domestic labor. Specifically, while an increase in a mother’s relative income allows her to reduce time spent on routine physical childcare, it does not trigger a reciprocal increase in the father’s contribution. Paternal involvement remains largely unresponsive to economic incentives, indicating that traditional gender role patterns and cultural matrices take precedence over rational resource distribution within the couple. Consequently, these results challenge the prevailing assumption that women’s economic autonomy is a sufficient catalyst for the egalitarianization of parental labor, suggesting that deeply rooted gender norms continue to shape the domestic sphere in Russia.
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