The Economic Gap Among Women in Time Spent on Housework in Former West Germany and Sweden

(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. …