Housework in the U.S. and Japan.

This paper compares the gender division of household labor in the United States and Japan to test if economic exchange and gender ideology theories operate equivalently in both contexts. Both nations have undergone similar trends of industrialization, urbanization, and other modernization forces, yet each country retains a unique cultural history with respect to the division of household labor. Previous work argues that the traditional gender division of work is more strongly enforced and encouraged through gender ideology in Japan than in the U.S. Using structural equations modeling, separate dimensions of gender ideology are modeled as latent variables, gender ideology is included explicitly as a mediating rather than an exogenous variable, and formal testing for equivalence of the models between the U.S. and Japan is possible. In Japan, going against the traditional beliefs that women really want a home and children and that a man's job is to earn money has the greatest impact on housework. In the U.S., relative income between the wife and husband is the biggest predictor of the division of household labor, but this factor is not significant in Japan. Women's work in the U.S. affects housework both directly and indirectly through beliefs about whether working hurts a woman's family relationships. The effect of gender ideology and work experience on the division of household labor are independent of each other in Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]