Women still spend more time caring for children compared to men, as evident from the US survey carried out between 2011 and 2021.
Interestingly, while levels of employment affected child care time for both men and women, for men the effect was less pronounced.
One other interesting finding is that the difference between men and women is minimal when both work full-time, suggesting a more equal distribution of duties due to lack of available time.
“May be it’s due to preferences” is not really a counterargument to the correlation being caused by sexism. Human preferences are heavily influenced by societal pressures such as assumed gender roles which fall under the scope of “sexism”.