Traditional gender roles still govern housework

Relative wages aren’t the driving force behind who does the bulk of the household chores and childcare – gender and social norms are the likely explanation, new research from the University of Technology Sydney reveals.

The traditional economic view about why couples divvy up work by gender, first proposed by Nobel Prize winning economist Gary Becker about 50 years ago, was that it made good economic sense. Becker’s theory proposed that couples divided their labour because it was more efficient – in the same way that a country might specialise in producing a specific good such as timber or oil, to create a competitive advantage.

Women, because they give birth and breastfeed, focus on domestic work, leaving men to focus on work outside the home and bring home the bacon. However, the role of men and women in contemporary society is changing rapidly, so does this theory still have merit?

To test whether “comparative advantage” influences how couples divide housework, economists Professor Peter Siminski and Rhiannon Yetsenga from the University of Technology Sydney examined data from the HILDA survey of Australian households, which tracks wages and time-use in the home.

The study, Specialization, Comparative Advantage, and the Sexual Division of Labor, was published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Labor Economics. It reveals that more than 75 per cent of heterosexual couples continue to divide their labour based on traditional gender roles.

“It was a difficult theory to test, partly because we can’t measure productivity in the home, but we can observe productivity in paid work – the hourly wage of each partner,” says Professor Siminski.

The researchers conclude that “comparative advantage” has little or no role in the sexual division of labour.

“Many women have a higher wage than their male partners, but the HILDA data shows they usually still do more housework than their partner, and less paid work.”

By comparing wages with time-use in the home, the researchers estimate that a woman’s hourly wage would need to be 109 times higher than her male partner’s wage before reaching equality in domestic work.

They note that this provocative figure is based on an extrapolation from patterns in the actual data, highlighting that hourly wages have almost no relationship with how couples share their domestic work.

Even considering couples without children, they found that a woman’s wage would need to be almost 13 times higher than her partner to reach the point where housework was shared equally.

The researchers conclude that “comparative advantage” has little or no role in the sexual division of labour.

“We find that relative wage only has a weak relationship with the allocation of domestic work time. Women are expected to do more domestic work than their male spouse at every point in the relative wage distribution,” says Ms Yetsenga.

Women’s participation in the labour force has increased dramatically in recent decades. However, a similar shift in men’s relative contribution to unpaid work has not occurred, contrary to the predictions of the traditional economic view.

“In fact, other studies have shown that women who earn more than their husbands do more – not less – housework,” she says. “More broadly, women also do more volunteering and unpaid work than men. In some cases, this separation of work reflects a couple’s preferences or better accommodates their lifestyle. But our results suggest that social norms are driving this.

“The data for same-sex couples also supports this conclusion. For them, relative wages seemed to have no relation at all to how housework is shared.”

The researchers argue that a more flexible approach to the household division of labour would ultimately allow for a more efficient allocation of time between home and the workforce.

Not only would it improve a couple’s welfare, but it would also help to reduce gender imbalances in the workplace, leading to a more productive and better-represented society.

This story was first published in the Sydney Morning Herald. Read the original article.