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The article focuses on the practices used by the first Russian women-historians in the 1st half of the 20th century to reconcile the main job, i.e. academic researches, and the domestic chores. Based on ego-documents (diaries, memoirs and personal letters), the authors try to reconstruct the main principles and strategies that successful Russian women-historians used for managing their various professional and home duties. The article also analyzes the practices of interaction between women-researchers and their maids who helped them to handle household affairs. Before the Great Revolution, nearly all first Russian women-historians were of noble and rich origin (from the families of intellectual Russian nobility). They did not need to take care of money and could spend time not not making a living, but research. Like other women in their position, they used waged labour (cooks, maids, and nannies) to create the conditions for their academic success. The Great Revolution and the Civil War changed the way of life for all the social strata. Those women-historians who chose to stay in their homeland rather than emigrate, had to take care of everyday problems of themselves and their families. Their career became to depend on the opportunity to share the home duties with someone else. When scholars became part of the Soviet elite, using domestic work became a socially upheld behavioral rule. Soviet women-historians hired women from villages who had fled from the collectivization to delegate them their routine domestic chores and to get free time for research and lecturing.

The historical decline in adults’ physical activity (PA) has been attributed to the growth in both sedentary occupations and car-dependent transportation. Missing from the conversation has been any examination of what role shifts in housework time/composition may have played. Historical time-use data for married women in the United States from 1936 to 2017 are used to assess trends in women’s moderate physical activity (PA) housework as measured by the typical metabolic equivalents (METs) for various core housework tasks. Analyses reveal that for much of the 20th century, the typical married woman likely met the Centers for Disease Control's PA recommendations through daily housework. However, time spent in moderate PA housework has declined at a faster pace than total housework time for the past 30 years. The downward trend appears to be driven primarily by changes other than household socio-demographics. Shifts in housework, both in terms of the composition and the overall time spent doing housework, have likely played an important role in the historical decline of adult women’s physical activity and rising obesity risk.

The narrowing domestic opportunities for employment n has led many Indonesian people of working age become migrant workers overseas. The left-behind husbands of female migrant workers must play a double role as both head and homemaker in the family. This research considers the underlying social context and the resultant meaning of housework for husbands. The analysis design was based on the phenomenological perspective introduced by Alfred Schutz. The results showed that the female population in the observed village decided to follow the flux of Indonesian workers migrating abroad, mostly to Hong Kong and Taiwan. Relying on the pay cut scheme for their departure to the destination countries, they were able to earn up to IDR 7 million per month (nearly USD 500). The husbands left-behind, with an age range of 31 to 57 years, accepted the responsibility of doing housework or working in the domestic sector because of economic constraint (‘because motive’) and the high income earned by their wives (‘in-order-to motive’). They interpreted housework as either (1) invisible underemployment or (2) main job. Keywords: Meaning, Husband, Indonesian Female Migrant Workers, Household

ObjectiveMany studies reveal a gender gap in spousal care during late life. However, this gap could be an artifact of methodological limitations (small and unrepresentative cross-sectional samples). Using a data set that overcomes these limitations, we re-examine the question of gender differences in spousal care and housework adjustment when a serious illness occurs.MethodWe use biannual waves between 2001 and 2015 of the German Socio-Economic Panel Study and growth curve analyses. We follow couples longitudinally (identified in the household questionnaire) to analyze shifts in spousal care hours and housework plus errand hours that occur as a response to the spousal care need. We test for interactions with levels of care need and with gender.ResultsWe found that men increase their care hours as much as women do, resulting in similar care hours. They also increase their housework and errand hours more than women do. Yet at lower levels of spousal care need, women still do more housework and errands because they spent more time doing housework before the illness.DiscussionEven in a context of children’s decreasing availability to care for parents, male spouses assume the required caregiving role in systems relying on a mixture of public and private care.

People now spend less time doing housework in general, and cooking in particular. So is cooking still a central feature of our daily eating practices? This article compares trends in household cooking durations in France and the USA in the period 1985–2010 using time-use surveys and practice theory. We ask how the association between cooking and eating at home has changed over time, and how it has contributed to the decline in the time spent on household cooking. Descriptive statistics show that US households spent 20 minutes less time per day cooking in 2010 than in 1985 (15 minutes less time per day in France). Linear regressions indicate that the association between cooking duration and the number of eating events at home has declined in the USA but not in France. The Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition method points to this fact as the primary reason for the change in cooking time in the USA; in France, decreased cooking time is accounted for primarily by changes in population characteristics. French and American food practices have followed gradually diverging trajectories, with cooking less a feature of eating practices – even at home – in the USA, whereas the association between eating and preparing food at home remains stable in France.

We use data from the most recent Australian Bureau of Statistics time use survey to investigate shares of domestic work along two dimensions; routine and non-routine activities, and housework done for the whole household versus housework done for oneself only. We argue that the latter is an underutilised marker of responsibility for household management and serving others. Exploiting data from matched household members, we examine relative shares of fathers and mothers, and also of co-resident young people aged 15–34 (416 households), to include inputs from the younger generation as well as the parental couple. Mothers do the greatest share of routine housework and housework for others; parents are relatively equal in the shares of non-routine housework and housework done for themselves only. Young people take on a minimal share of total household work, particularly tasks done for others in the family. Parents’ employment configuration is associated with adjustments in shares between them, with no effect on children’s shares. © 2016, Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht.

(ProQuest: ... denotes formulae omitted.)INTRODUCTIONWhile the gender gap in the performance of housework has narrowed in many countries for which data are available, it remains universal and large (Sayer, 2010); not surprisingly, the quantitative research on domestic labor has emphasized its pervasiveness. Recently, however, researchers have begun to pay more attention to disparities in housework time among women, especially those related to economic inequality. Specifically, studies of the relationship between married and cohabiting women's earnings and time spent doing housework, which tended to emphasize women's economic resources relative to their male partners', has added a focus on women's own earnings. Employing representative data from the National Survey of Families and Households in the U.S. (NSFH), Gupta (2006, 2007) found that married and cohabiting women's individual earnings were negatively associated with the time they spent on everyday chores such as cooking and cleaning. Describing this relationship as "autonomy," Gupta speculated that it originated in women's use of their economic resources to purchase housework substitutes such as prepared meals and domestic help. Or perhaps women with higher earnings simply "opt out" of housework because substituting would violate gender norms ascribing to them the primary responsibility for its performance (Killewald, 2011).In contrast to most of the existing quantitative research emphasizing the gender gap in the performance of domestic labor, the autonomy model highlights the relationship of differences among women with disparities in their time spent doing housework. In particular it focuses on economic inequality-women with higher earnings are predicted to spend less time on housework than those with lower earnings. To examine its prevalence outside the U.S., we apply the autonomy model to two countries other than the U.S., namely the former West Germany and Sweden. Though these countries are broadly comparable to the U.S. as fellow "western" nations, they differ from it, and from each other, in key ways that are relevant to our test of the autonomy hypothesis. They are characterized by dissimilar levels of economic inequality, especially among women, and they feature quite distinct regimes of gender role norms and state policies that promote or inhibit women's labor force participation. We use individual level data to determine for each country the size of the "economic gap" among women in their housework time, which we define as the difference between the average number of hours spent on it by women at the highest and lowest deciles of their own earnings. Though we do not directly incorporate national measures of women's labor force participation, earnings inequality among women, or the cultural and policy dimensions relevant to the division of domestic labor into our models, these factors frame our expectations for each country as well as our interpretation of our findings.ARGUMENTThe quantitative literature on the relationship between women's earnings and housework in the U.S. has expanded over the last decade to include data from multiple countries. Like the earlier research on the U.S., however, it has tended to focus on women's earnings or income relative to their male partners'.2 (Bittman et al, 2003-Australia; Evertsson and Nermo, 2004-Sweden; Geist, 2009-Germany) However, a new strand of inquiry challenges this focus on women's relative earnings by theorizing women's individual earnings as being associated with their time spent on housework. Using nationally representative data from the National Survey of Families and Households (NSFH), Gupta (2006) found that in the U.S., women's own earnings mattered more for their housework time than did their relative earnings. Gupta dubbed this negative relationship between women's own earnings and time spent on domestic labor the "autonomy" model. This model predicts that a woman with low individual earnings will spend more time doing housework than one with high earnings, even if their earnings relative to their male partners' are equal. …

This chapter focuses on the extent to which women combine housework with simultaneously minding children. Given that housework can be done along with child caregiving, but presumably at a cost, this characteristic of home production time constitutes another margin in women’s lives where the balancing act of their many roles plays out. After exploring the existing literature and a simple conceptual model, the authors analyze data from the American Time Use Surveys, 2003–2011. The results indicate systematic differences in doing housework alone or with or without children present according to a number of characteristics of women and their households. Women with more minutes in employment that day are more likely to engage in household chores alone and are less likely to have children present while doing housework.

Using data from the 2006 Turkish Time-Use Survey, this chapter examines gender differences in time allocation among married opposite-sex couples over the life cycle. While the authors find large discrepancies in the gender division of both paid and unpaid work at each life stage, the gender gap in paid and unpaid work is largest among parents of infants compared to parents of older children and couples without children. Married women’s housework time remains relatively unchanged across their life cycle, while older men spend more time doing housework than their younger counterparts. Over the course of the life cycle, women’s total work burden increases relative to men.

The ability to perform instrumental activities of daily living (IADL) is thought to be relatively intact for people with mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Doing housework as part of IADL is an important skill needed for older people to live independently and successfully. A limited number of studies explore the association between MCI and doing housework. The aim of this study was to assess the association between MCI and doing housework among old people.The study employed a community-based, cross-sectional design. A total of 1773 older people residents, aged 60 and over, were randomly recruited in the Suzhou area, and they underwent the Montreal cognitive assessment (MoCA) for screening MCI in 2009. Participants were required to complete a questionnaire, which was comprised of their demographic information, health status, and life style, to evaluate the associations between MCI and these factors.About 13% of the respondents were found to have MCI. People with MCI are found to be less healthy and live unhealthy lifestyles. After adjusting confounding factors, a significant association was observed between MCI and not doing housework (Odds ratio (OR) = 1.64; 95% confidence interval (CI) = 1.17-2.30).MCI is associated with doing less housework. The deterioration in the ability to do housework is a potentially important indicator of evolving cognitive impairment in some old people.

This paper examines the ways in which non-standard employment conditions of fathers and their partners are associated with the time fathers spend in household labour caring for children and doing housework. The data come from a national telephone survey conducted in 2010 with a unique purposive sample of 300 fathers who contributed at least 30 per cent to the total time spent in household labour. We find that fathers who worked irregular hours, night shifts or took work home on a regular basis spent more time doing housework tasks than fathers without these employment conditions. Further, fathers' whose partners worked weekends, nights or travelled for work did more housework and childcare than fathers' with partners without these work schedules. We conclude that non-standard employment may provide an opportunity for greater shared household labour arrangements.

The present study uses panel data models to control unobserved characteristics and to investigate how the presence of spouses in interviews influences reports regarding housework and earnings contributions. Both husbands and wives relatively overreport their housework contributions but do not overreport their earnings contributions. The amount of time spent doing housework lacks a precise measure and involves more subjective estimates than earnings reports. It is argued that the ambiguity of the housework contribution mitigates the guilt felt by overreporting the housework contribution. In addition, without controlling for unobserved characteristics, OLS models overstate the influence of the presence of spouses in the interviews.

Physical Activity Effects in Elderly Female: Evaluation through Six-minute Walking Test Study aim. Aerobic capacity is very important for elderly. Daily living activities, such as walking, doing housework and shopping, require a good strength, but also a good aerobic endurance. The aim of this study was to verify the effects of regular training activity on a typical daily action, such as deambulation. Material and methods. Twenty-six volunteer elderly women randomly divided into two groups, group II (age = 64,5 ± 3,58 years, weight = 61,67 ± 4,25 kg, height = 1,62 ± 0,04 m; BMI = 23,67 ± 1,79 kg m-2), group I (age = 65,21 ± 4,59 years, weight = 63,36 ± 7,59 kg, height = 1,62 ± 0,06 m; BMI = 24,1 ± 1,98 kg m-2) participated in this study. Groups performed endurance training for eight weeks (2 days per week, 1 hour each, for experimental group II; 1 day per week, 1 hour each, for experimental group I). Exercises involved in many possibilities of physical expression to keeping all body in motion for at least 30 min. During the second 30 min exercises for abdominal and lower limb muscles were proposed. The physical efficacy was tested through 6 min walking test. Results. After the training all people increased the distance in the test. Group II participants significantly improved their distance (pre-training = 636.25 m, post-training = 673.75 m). Group I reported also improvements (pre = 568.21 m; post = 600 m), but with a minor level of significance. Conclusions. Specific regular physical activity provides significant benefits adopting two sessions per week but it is also important do not underestimate the possibility, where people can not, of a one training session per week. Regular and adequate levels of physical activity allow improving daily living activity helping the elderly to keep their autonomy as long as possible.

Synopsis Informed by research on the division of housework for (heterosexual) couples, especially those conducted in Japan, this study explores various aspects of the housework division of lesbian couples in Japan, using information from face-to-face interviews with 12 couples. The analysis shows variation, flexibility and prominence of negotiations in housework division among the couples. The women saw time availability, as well as preference for, sensitivity about and ability to undertake specific tasks as the factors affecting the division. The lack of reference to income difference in the women's interpretation of their housework division, their view of housework and housewifery, and the importance of choice and freedom in doing or not doing housework are also explored in the article. Finally, the connection between the value placed on housework on the one hand, and the significance of being a woman and being in a relationship with a woman on the other, is discussed.

Do husbands and wives divide housework on the basis of who makes more money? Much of the recent literature has focused on the effects of individuals’ earnings relative to their partners’ on their housework. By contrast, this paper analyzes the effects of women’s own earnings on the time they spend doing housework in the context of heterosexual couple households. A conservative estimate using the second wave of the National Survey of Families and Households (NSFH) is that the negative association of women’s housework with their own earnings is two to three times greater than that with their partners’; in the full model, the association with partners’ earnings is not statistically significant. The importance of women’s own earnings in housework models is highlighted by the comparable effect of income on housework among single women. It appears that so far as housework is concerned, women do not benefit greatly from their male partners’ incomes. The finding emphasizes the gender segregation of domestic labor, and underscores the importance of income differences among women in explaining their housework behavior. It shows that the difference between the mean housework hours of the women with the lowest and highest earnings is as large as the difference between the mean housework hours of women and men.

Using data drawn from the second wave of the National Study of Families and Households (n = 3,263), this study examines relationships between poverty status and hours spent doing housework. The measure of housework time was computed by summing self-reported estimates of the number of hours spent performing core domestic tasks such as ironing, preparing meals, and washing dishes. Hierarchical regression analysis indicates that compared to their non-poor counterparts, women in poverty spend significantly more time performing household tasks. The effect of poverty on men's housework time was unchanged. The findings from this study may be useful for both policy and practice in recognizing that poor women carry an extra burden of added household time that may deplete personal resources and further complicate efforts to move into paid employment.

Share households composed solely of men are a site in which masculine identities in the home are disembedded from marital ideologies. This allows us to unravel the connections between housework, power and what it means to be a man. The study finds that the domestic labour practices of men who reside with their peers reflect those traditionally associated with husband-hood, although the bases for these interactions, and the associated play of power, differ in the absence of a wife. It is evident that gender continues to be an important organizing principle of domestic labour outside marital homes.

The fundamental question in the study of the gendered division of household labor has come to be why, in the face of dramatic changes in women's employment and earnings, housework remains “women's work.” As a possible answer to this question, Brines (1994) presented a provocative conceptual model of the relationship between economic dependence and the performance of housework by wives and husbands. She concluded that the link between economic dependence and housework follows rules of economic exchange for wives, but among husbands, a gender display model is operative. This paper replicates and extends Brines' model by (a) replicating her work using a different data set; (b) adding additional controls to the model, including a measure of gender ideology; and (c) modeling a distributional (as opposed to absolute) measure of housework. For a measure of hours spent doing housework, the results of my analyses are consistent with Brines' suggestion of separate gender-specific processes linking economic dependence and amount of housework performed. For a distributional measure of housework, on the other hand, my analyses contradict Brines' findings and suggest that both husbands and wives are acting to neutralize a nonnormative provider role when they do housework. Further analyses suggest that the phenomenon is more likely one of deviance neutralization than of gender display.

This study examines the relationship between the distribution of labour at home and employed women's psychological distress. The distribution of labour at home is measured by wives' estimates of their own and their husbands' time spent doing housework. It is hypothesized that what is more important to women's well-being is their estimates of their husbands' time spent doing housework rather than their own time. It is further hypothesized that one pathway in which wives' estimates of husbands' time spent doing housework influences their well-being is through perceptions of support. In a sample of 153 employed married women, using regression analyses, results are consistent with the predictions made. First, wives' estimates of their husbands' time spent doing housework is a better predictor of their well-being than their estimates of their own time spent. Second, support acts as a partial mediator in this relationship. These findings are discussed with respect to recent work in the area. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The use of human resources of women in rural and urban areas in Turkey was studied using the responses from 284 households. The findings suggested that women in both rural and urban areas have skills such as sewing, embroidery and knitting and that only a small number of them use their skills for generating income from home. Women spend most of their time doing housework and looking after children. However, there were many statistically significant differences between women from different areas. In general, women in urban areas, who tended to be better educated, favoured personal fulfilment more than women in rural areas, but in both areas women placed more value on their traditional domestic roles.

This paper analyzes the activity patterns of adult men and women in approximately 110 Rwandese households surveyed four times in 1982–1983. Dynamic models are separately estimated for men and women for the time spent sleeping and resting, performing heavy activities, doing housework, and on agriculture. The models postulate simultaneity between men and women's activities and investigate the differential feedbacks. The main findings are that low incomes and high food prices reduce the households' energy intakes, thereby forcing the adults to spend additional time resting and sleeping. Second, both men and women share the workload in spite of poor nutritional status. Third, for women, there is substitution between housework and agriculture, the former tasks being relegated to other household members. Lastly, energy intakes of twice the Basal Metabolic Rate seem inadequate for the sustenance of active adults. The policy implications of the results are discussed.

Aline Silva-Costa,1,2 Frida Marina Fischer,1 Rosane Harter Griep,2 Lúcia Rotenberg2 1School of Public Health, University of São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil; 2Laboratory of Health, Environment and Education, Oswaldo Cruz Institute (Fiocruz), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Abstract: Night shift employment involves displacing sleep to the daytime. For female workers, the opportunity for daytime sleep is influenced by routine housework demands, which aggravates sleep deprivation. Allowing naps to be taken during the night shift of work is a frequent practice at some hospitals and can help reduce the effects of sleep deprivation. We hypothesize that an association between domestic work and the length of naps during night work exists for nursing professionals. To test this hypothesis, two cross-sectional studies were conducted in two different hospitals. In Study 1, female workers answered questionnaires regarding sleeping habits, professional work, and housework demands. In Study 2, data regarding napping during shifts was obtained by actigraphy, a noninvasive method of monitoring the human sleep–wake cycle. The demand for the performance of housework was measured by (i) domestic work hours (total time spent performing domestic work per week), and (ii) domestic workload, which considers the degree of sharing domestic tasks and the number of people living at home. The populations from the two studies were subdivided into groups, based on the duration of napping at work. Data on naps were analyzed according to domestic demands, using the Mann–Whitney and Chi-squared tests. Among the two study populations (Studies 1 and 2), those in Study 2 were older, had shorter professional weekly work hours, worked more night shifts, and dedicated more time to housework. Significant associations were only found in Study 2, where greater time napping at work was associated with both greater time spent doing housework and greater domestic workload. The known benefits of napping during night shifts seem to be especially relevant for female workers who are more sleep-deprived from working more night shifts and who have higher demands for housework. Keywords: gender, night work, domestic work, sleep, women

There was an percentage error for female subjects in the fifth paragraph in the discussion section. The corrected sentence is: In the present study, the prevalence of doing housework was 52–81% for males and 64–93% for females.

This chapter examines variations in time spent on domestic labour and perceptions of the fairness of the domestic division of labour as men and women transition through two key life course events, marriage and childbirth. We use longitudinal data from the Negotiating the Life Course project enabling examination of housework patterns and fairness perceptions before and after transitions to marriage and parenthood. Our results show that women spend considerably more hours on average doing housework than men and that women are more likely than men to perceive the division of housework as unfair. The transition to motherhood results in an increase in women’s routine housework hours, but for men there is considerable stability in housework hours across marriage and parenthood transitions. Perceptions of housework fairness do not change following the transition to marriage, but there is some evidence that having a first child increases both men’s and women’s perceptions that housework arrangements are unfair. We conclude that future work on domestic labour needs to move beyond cross-sectional approaches to explanations of variations in behaviour and perceptions within individuals over the life course.

“Is Anyone Doing the Housework?” (Bianchi et al. 2000) was motivated, like much of the research on housework, by a desire to better understand gender inequality and social change in the work and family arena in the United States. During the 1990s, Arlie Hochschild’s (1989) influential book, The Second Shift, provided the dominant assessment of the gender division of labor in the home (Konigsberg 2011): men were unwilling to share the burden of work in the home and thus employed women came home to a “second shift” of housework and childcare, increasing gender inequality. Her rich qualitative study was based on a small sample of unknown generalizability, however (Milkie, Raley, & Bianchi 2009). The collection and release of the large and nationally representative 1987–88 National Survey of Families and Households (NSFH) unleashed a flurry of housework articles in the quantitative sociological literature. The NSFH had the advantage of reports of housework from both members of a couple and husbands’ and wives’ assessments of fairness in the household division of labor, but these data could not provide the trend analysis critical to the understanding of social change that time diary data collections allowed. “Is Anyone Doing the Housework?” used the NSFH but also presented analysis of the only nationally representative data available – time diaries – with which to assess trends in housework and broaden the discussion of how women and men might be reallocating time in the home during a period of rapid change in women’s work outside the home. The citation count in Google Scholar stands at 910 citations (as of April 20, 2012), with those citations continuing to the present.1 In the article, we showed that the gender division of labor in housework became more equal over this period, in part because men increased their time in housework but more importantly because women dramatically decreased the time they spent in these activities. Men increased their propensity to do housework and the increase was not a result of change in population composition, whereas for women it was a mix of decreased likelihood of doing housework but also an increase in the proportion of women least likely to spend time in housework (e.g., employed women). We compared time diary data to the NSFH, demonstrating that the NSFH survey questions resulted in estimates that were about 50 percent higher than time diary estimates but that both data sources yielded similar conclusions about the gender gap in housework. Finally, using the NSFH data, we provided a multivariate description of the correlates of wives’ housework time, husbands’ housework time and the gender gap in housework time of married couples. The findings remain relevant today, save the need for the update of trends provided here. Using time diary data for 1965, 1975, 1985 and 1995, our observation window on housework was one in which the pressure on women to “shed load” to accommodate increased market work was high and in which the pressure on men to “pick up some of the slack” was perhaps also high. Our data analysis spanned the 1970–90 period of greatest labor force increases for U.S. women, particularly married women with young children. Subsequent trend analyses of women’s labor force participation, housework and childcare in the 1990s showed much less increase and a leveling off in rates by the end of the 20th century (Sayer 2005; Sayer, Bianchi, & Robinson 2004), causing some to argue that the gender revolution was over (Cotter, Hermsen, & Vanneman 2011).

There is evidence to indicate that the amount of time spent on household work in the United States is decreasing and that the division of work among household members is changing. However, involvement in household work is rarely measured in surveys, and when it is measured, there is reason to question the reliability and validity of the measures used. This paper describes the ways in which household work has been measured and compares results obtained using different approaches to data collection. Our analysis indicates that direct questions on the amount of time spent doing housework tend to overestimate the time spent when compared with time diaries. We conclude that methodologically oriented research designed to create reliable and valid measures of involvement in household work for inclusion in surveys is needed.

In this article, a comparison is made between the time that cohabiting and married women and men spend doing housework, to determine whether there are differences between them and to isolate the sources of those differences. Differences in cohabiting and married women's and men's household labor time are interpreted in light of the way that marital status may affect how gender is accomplished. Using the National Survey of Families and Households, the authors found that marital status affects women's household labor time but not men's; married women spend significantly more time on housework than do cohabiting women. In addition, the gap between cohabiting and married women's housework time cannot be accounted for by sociodemographic differences between them. It was also found that cohabiting women are more like single, noncohabiting women than they are like married women. That is, the research demonstrates the uniqueness of married women. It is not simply the presence of a man that is associated with women's spending more time on housework; it is the presence of a husband.

The standard household production model pioneered by Gary Becker (1965) does not allow time to be spent simultaneously in difierent activities. No theoretical framework for household production to date incorporates multitasking as an economic decision. Yet, time-diary data are often speciflcally collected in such a way as to capture multitasking, and these data reveal that individuals indeed regularly multitask. For example, child care|a core component of household production|is regularly performed while doing housework. In this paper, we formulate a household production model that allows time spent in child care to be sole-tasked or multitasked with other household production activities. We then use data from the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children to empirically examine our prior that sole-tasked and multitasked child care have difierent productivities (in terms of child outcomes). Finally, we derive some empirical implications of our model that we test using repeated cross-sections of data from the Australian Time Use Surveys to show that parents make choices to sole-task or multitask for reasons related to constraints and

Although much recent research has explored the division of household labor between husbands and wives, few studies have examined housework patterns across marital statuses. This paper uses data from the National Survey of Families and Households to analyze differences in time spent on housework by men and women in six different living situations: never married and living with parents, never married and living independently, cohabiting, married, divorced, and widowed. In all situations, women spend more time than men doing housework, but the gender gap is widest among married persons. The time women spend doing housework is higher among cohabitants than among the never-married, is highest in marriage, and is lower among divorcees and widows. Men's housework time is very similar across both never-married living situations, in cohabitation, and in marriage. However, divorced and widowed men do substantially more housework than any other group of men, and they are especially more likely than their married counterparts to spend more time cooking and cleaning. In addition to gender and marital status, housework time is affected significantly by several indicators of workload (e.g., number of children, home ownership) and time devoted to nonhousehold activities (e.g., paid employment, school enrollment)-most of these variables have greater effects on women's housework time than on men's. An adult son living at home increases women's housework, whereas an adult daughter at home reduces housework for women and men. These housework patterns are generally consistent with an emerging perspective that views housework as a symbolic enactment of gender relations. We discuss the implications of these findings for perceptions of marital equity.

There is little argument about the fact that it is still primarily women who are responsible for work done in the home. Unlike most men, women in Canada spend a large portion of their lives doing housework. In addition, at present over fifty per cent of women are in the work force and account for forty per cent of the labour force. The clear implication of these facts is that many women contribute to their families both through household and labour-force activities.

A number of studies published in the 1970s asserted that the amount of time women spend doing housework shows no historical decline. This article draws on evidence from time-budget surveys—three from the United States (1965, 1975, and 1985) and three from the United Kingdom (1961, 1974, and 1984)—to investigate the evolution of housework time for men and women over the last three decades. Clearly much other than housework has changed over this period. More women have paid jobs, more men are unemployed, and families have gotten smaller on average. Even having controlled for such sociodemographic changes, we conclude that in the two countries, women in the 1980s do substantially less housework than those in equivalent circumstances in the 1960s, and that men do a little more than they did (although still much less than women). These changes correspond closely to developments in four other countries (Canada, Holland, Denmark, and Norway) for which historical time-budget evidence is available.