The unchanging divide: housework and labor responsibilities in late family stages

Publication type

Journal Article

Series Number

Author

Publication date

August 13, 2025

Summary:

This paper examines the long-term evolution of paid and unpaid work within heterosexual parental couples who remain together as children transition into adulthood. Using UK longitudinal data from 1992 to 2023, we document persistent gendered divisions of labor during both co-residence with young adult children and after their emancipation. A dynamic difference-in-differences framework reveals that while emancipation leads mothers to significantly reduce their housework and expand their paid labor hours and earnings, fathers’ time allocation remains largely unchanged. Further analyses suggest that, despite these adjustments, gendered patterns in domestic labor endure due to entrenched norms and task specialization, even in female breadwinner households. Our findings highlight the persistence of early household specializations well beyond the caregiving years and underscore the role of social norms and learned behaviors in maintaining gendered divisions of labor.

Published in

SERIEs: Journal of the Spanish Economic Association

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1007/s13209-025-00314-z

ISSN

18694187

Subjects

Notes

Open Access

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

Online Early

#588759

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