Fifty years of change updated: Cross-national gender convergence in housework

(ProQuest: ... denotes formulae omitted.)1.IntroductionIn this paper we update previous cross-national evidence on the gender division of housework. Due to the usual gap that occurs between the collection of survey data and their public launch, most research on this topic published up to the end of the first decade of the 21st century - including some influential decade reviews (Bianchi and Milkie 2010; Lachance-Grzela and Bouchard 2010) - relied on research based on data on housework time from the years up to 2005-2006 at the latest (although Bianchi et al. 2012 updated the US time use data to 2010).Using the Multinational Time Use Study (Fisher and Gershuny 2013), we bring the cross-national evidence up to date by including data from 10 additional surveys from 9 countries for the period 2005-2011 (Australia, Canada, Finland, France, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, U.K., and U.S.A.).The study of housework is interesting for three main reasons. Firstly, it is a routine, repetitive and disliked activity, which means that the relative time spouses spend on housework has long been recognized as an important indicator of marital power (Davies and Greenstein 2013). We use core housework (cleaning, cooking, and clothes care) as our measure in these analyses because these are both the most disliked domestic labour activities and the most traditionally feminine. They have, therefore, been the ones that have been most resistant to change. Since the burden of responsibility for these activities traditionally falls on women, this can have negative consequences for their work-life balance and their sense of time pressure. Secondly, the division of housework is significantly related to couples' well-being. Disagreement over housework is one of the main sources of marital conflict (Ruppaner 2010; van der Lippe, Voorpostel, and Hewitt 2014). Between 36% (Portugal) and 90% (Finland) of married/cohabiting couples across Europe report having disagreements over housework (van der Lippe, Voorpostel, and Hewitt 2014). Thirdly, housework has been an important measure in the debate over the stalling or not of the 'gender revolution' (e.g., England 2010). The inclusion of more recent surveys in our analyses allows us to bring the cross-national evidence underpinning the 'convergence versus stall' debate in the gender division of housework up to the end of the first decade of the current century.2.DataTime use diary data is generally regarded as the 'gold standard' for the measurement of time spent in routine activities such as housework (e.g., Robinson and Godbey 1997; Bianchi, Robinson and Milkie 2006). The data we use comes from Multinational Time Use Study (MTUS), an international archive of cross-national time use surveys dating from the 1960s to the current day. We use data from 19 countries between 1961 and 2011, chosen on the basis of their data series and quality. The sample is limited to adults aged 19 or older. Table 1 shows the full list of surveys included in the data, sample sizes, and average minutes spent on core housework by men and women.In the analyses that follow, housework refers to the most disliked, routine, and traditionally feminine-defined housework activities of laundry and cleaning, food preparation, and cooking. Household chores that are traditionally masculine or genderneutral, such as home maintenance, car repairs, or shopping, are excluded.3.MethodsWe first calculated average minutes spent on core housework by men and women across countries (see Table 1). We then applied multilevel models estimating the effect of gender, controlling for relevant socio-demographic factors. The baseline model is a random intercept model, where individuals are nested in surveys (country-year), showing the effect of being a woman on the time spent on core housework with no socio-demographic controls:...In a second model we add controls for demographic and socio-economic variables, namely age, educational attainment, employment and marital status, number of children under age 18 in the household, and the presence of a child under age 5 in the household. …