A new experimental study into attitudes towards the sharing of housework between couples has found that women are probably more likely to do more housework, even when they work longer hours than their male partner, because they have a higher tendency to avoid conflict rather than because they think they are better at it or enjoy it.
The study, published by the Institute for Social and Economic Research, found that both men and women would be happier with equal division of housework – so it seems women might only take on more to avoid argument.
The study for the ESRC Research Centre on Micro-Social Change uses the experimental Innovation Panel of the huge Understanding Society study of UK households, to look at how men and women approach the division of housework.
Previous studies have shown that that the incidence of divorce is lower among couples who share housework and childcare, and policy makers are interested to see how the UK could reduce the high levels of family breakdown.
Dr Maria Iacovou explained:
“Women do more housework than men. Even though the role of women has been changing – education levels are now as good or better than those of men; most women do paid work for most of their adult lives and although the gender pay gap still exists, women’s earnings are gradually approaching those of men. However, while some things are changing in the domestic sphere with men taking on more housework and childcare, women still do the lion’s share. We wanted to find out if they do this because they prefer to do it. Our results show they do not.
We asked people to visualize themselves in a range of hypothetical scenarios in which the share of housework and paid work done by the respondent and his or her partner is varied, and to report on how satisfactory they find each of these scenarios.
Our main finding is that both men and women display a marked preference for equity within a partnership, in terms of both the allocation of housework and the total allocation of paid and unpaid work; there is little evidence that either men or women are systematically selfish in their preferences, or that men’s preferences differ systematically from those of women, or that either men or women prefer arrangements under which the woman specializes in keeping home while the man specializes in going out to earn.
The only exceptions are in situations where there is an unequal sharing of paid work between partners – women seem to have a stronger preference then men for adjusting their housework share in response to their paid work share – or in scenarios where the woman works full time and the man works part-time, men’s and women’s preferences diverge, with women preferring to do less housework than their partner but the men still say they prefer to do an equal amount of housework
Women with children under five expressed the highest preference for housework to be shared equally.
Given these results our main conclusion is that women don’t want to do more housework so the reasons why they might end up doing it must lie elsewhere, such as in the different bargaining strategies employed by men and women. If men work part-time and women work full-time, the men still preferred women to share the housework equally – that could cause conflict – so compromise and getting on with it might be the female response rather than the choice they would like to make.”
Housework share between partners: Experimental evidence on gender identity
by Katrin Auspurg (Goethe University Frankfurt Main), Maria Iavocou (University of Cambridge) and Cheti Nicoletti (University of York) is published in the ISER Working Paper Series no.2015-03 and was funded by the ESRC Research Centre on Micro-Social Change.