Michael Bittman,
Paula England, Liana Sayer,
Nancy Folbre, and George Matheson
Abstract
We test hypotheses about the effect of husbands’
and wives’ contribution to family income on the amount of
housework each spouse does. We use time-use diary data from the
Australian Time Use Survey of 1992, and compare our results to
recent analyses of American data by Brines, Greenstein, and Gupta,
as well as our own U.S. analysis. Our models control for education,
children, number of hours of market work of each spouse, and total
household income. Consistent with predictions from exchange theory
that “money talks” in marital bargaining, women in both
nations decrease the amount of time they spend on housework as
their income increases, up to the point where both sexes contribute
equally to the household’s income. In the U.S. (although
not in Australia), there is also a small increase in the time
men spend on housework as their wives contribute more to the family
income. But in other respects, gender still trumps money. In both
nations, women do more unpaid labor than men, even when other
things are equal, and in Australia, the amount of unpaid work
men do is unaffected by their wives’ level of income. Moreover,
in both nations, among those couples in the range from equal provision
to women providing all the income, the allocation of housework
is opposite to that predicted by exchange theory. When couples
are deviating from the normative standard that men should make
more money than women, they become more traditional in dividing
up the housework, as if to compensate. This compensatory conformity
takes a different form in the two nations. In the U.S., the response
(though small) comes from the men, who react to economic dependence
by doing less housework than men whose earnings equal their wives.’
In Australia, it is the women who react. When they are earning
most of the money, they do substantially more housework than women
whose earnings equal their husbands’. We speculate that these
national differences in how relative earnings affect housework
flow from the more entrenched institutionalization of male breadwinning
and mothers’ part-time employment in Australia.
Michael
Bittman,Social Policy Research
Center, University of New South Wales, Australia Paula England,Department
of Sociology, Northwestern University Liana Sayer,Population Studies Center, University of Pennsylvania
Nancy Folbre,Department
of Economics, University of Massachusetts, Amherst George Matheson,
Department of Sociology, University of Wollongong, Australia
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