Housework in Double-Income Marriages Still Divides Unevenly

Fall 2002, Volume 24, Number 1

Paula England, professor of sociology at Northwestern and IPR faculty fellow, focuses much of her work on gender, work, and family, with a special interest in a subset of “women’s work”— care work — that includes paid child care, nursing, social work, and teaching. “In ‘When gender trumps money’,” says England, “I was interested in how couples are negotiating changing gender roles in the household, and whether men’s roles are more resistant to change than women’s.” Her interests in gender dynamics in families are further explored in the Time, Love, Cash, Couples, and Children (TLC3) study, where she is a co-principal investigator with IPR colleagues Kathryn Edin, Greg Duncan, and Lindsay Chase-Lansdale. England is particularly interested in the interplay between economically-based power, gender norms, and emotional skills in the dynamics between married and cohabiting couples.

This may come as no surprise to women readers, but husbands are not picking up the slack in housework when a wife goes to work. As Faculty Fellow Paula England finds in her IPR working paper, When Gender Trumps Money: Bargaining and Time in Household Work, women who enter the workforce do cut back on the hours spent attending domestic chores. However, men do not compensate by adding significantly to theirs. In Australia, one of the countries examined in the study, women who earn more than their husbands actually do more housework than those whose earnings are equal.

England uses a 1992 time diary survey conducted in Australia and compares the findings to two U.S. data sets (the 1985 Panel Study of Income Dynamics and the 1987 National Survey of Families and Households) that contain information on time use among families with children. Both data sources are national probability samples that include men of all classes in rough proportion to their representation in the population.

Housework included meal preparation and clean-up, laundry, housecleaning, paying bills, lawn, yard, pool and pet care, home maintenance, and car care. Child care and shopping were excluded so that the two datasets remained comparable. Australian men contributed 11.4 hours (mean) to housework per week while Australian women contributed 23 hours. American men did 16.8 hours (mean) and American women did 34.8 per week.

The patterns of household work were compared along a scale from the wife earning no income to earning all the household’s income. In the Australian sample, 20% of women were employed full-time, 39% were employed part-time, and 40% were not employed. In the United States, 40% of women worked full-time, 25% were employed part-time, and 35% not employed.

Money Talks in Marriage…to a Point. In the United States, women do less housework as they earn a higher proportion of income. Those contributing half the income do about 6 hours less housework than those contributing very little income, net of market hours worked. For the majority of Australian women, this is the case as well. However, between the point where women contribute about half the income and the point at which they provide all of it, more money does not mean less housework. On the contrary, their housework increases by about 5–6 hours per week. However, it should be noted that only 14% of the Australian women earned more than half the household income.

Increasing housework, England suggests, might be an attempt to neutralize the reversal of gender roles. Past research, for example, finds that women who earned more than their husbands admitted that they felt the need to devise strategies to make him feel less stigmatized, including adding more housework to her routine.

Although women are using employment as a bargaining chip for less housework, men are not altering their contribution. Australian men, especially, are impervious to their wives’ earnings. They do not increase housework, regardless of the hours their spouses work. American men, on the other hand, tend to increase their housework, but by only a few hours per week.

Clearly, money talks in marriage. However, gender roles still pervade in many respects. Even when women and men agree in theory that a more egalitarian division of labor should prevail, their actual behavior is much less egalitarian. Although women can and do use income as a bargaining chip to reduce housework, they either cannot or do not attempt to use it to increase their husband’s work. For the most part, they replace their time with purchased services, or the housework simply goes undone.

Perhaps, England argues, it is more acceptable for women to adapt more masculine roles, but it is less acceptable for men to adapt the more feminine role of housework.

“Women and everything associated with them is devalued in society,” says England, “so it is easier for people to accept women taking on traditionally men’s activities than for men to take on traditionally female. But of course the ‘gender revolution’ won’t work unless it is a two-way street. The female activities that are necessary and important, such as child rearing and household work, need to be degendered as women take on more traditionally male responsibilities or women will either work more than men, or these important tasks simply won’t get done.”

England argues that the value of household work should be counted in measures analogous to the gross national product. In current policy, she says, “accounting for how women’s unpaid child care is going to be replaced should be a more important consideration in welfare reform than it has been to date.”