The Division of Housework between Partners. Does Gender Identity Matter?

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Abstract: In this paper, we estimate a model of housework allocation between partners that takes account of the individual economic utility of each partner and of the psychic cost of choosing housework arrangements that deviate from gender role norms. We predict the economic utilities by using a survey experiment run in the UK Household Longitudinal Study; whereas we measure the effect of gender norms by considering a gender attitude index averaged across peers of the two partners. As expected, if the peers have very traditional gender role attitudes, then there is a high psychic cost for the couple of choosing arrangements where the man does more housework than his partner. Even after controlling for the economic utilities of the two partners, we find that the peers' gender role attitudes matter significantly in explaining the household housework decisions. We conclude that gender norms shared by peers seems to be an important explanation for the gender asymmetry in housework shares between partners observed in today’s society.

Authors: Danilo Cavapozzi, Marco Francesconi and Cheti Nicoletti.