Absolute Earnings, Relative Earnings, and Women's Housework

Sanjiv Gupta, University of Massachusetts at Amherst

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. Using the second wave of the National Survey of Families and Households (NSFH), I find that the relationship between women’s relative earnings and housework time documented in previous research is driven entirely by women’s own absolute earnings. Their male partners’ earnings have no significant effect on women’s housework hours. Further, I show that the variation in women’s own earnings can explain the “gender display” pattern in the association between women’s relative earnings and their housework documented in some recent studies. These findings underscore the importance of income variation among women in explaining their housework behavior.