Publication type
Journal Article
Authors
Publication date
December 15, 2026
Summary:
The transition to first parenthood is a critical juncture at which both paid and unpaid work become more gendered within couples. From a life course perspective, parenthood is not a discrete event but a process that couples traverse together across successive phases. Far less is known, however, about how the gendered division of labour and its implications for the within-couple pay gap evolve across subsequent phases of parenthood. Using longitudinal data from UK dual-earner couples (1996–2023), this study examines gender dynamics across four parenthood phases using couple-level fixed-effects and Karlson–Holm–Breen (KHB) mediation analysis. First, we find that the initial shock of parenthood is not temporary. Gendered divisions become entrenched in the established phase and re-intensify with subsequent births, while male partners’ labour contribution remains virtually unchanged. Second, the KHB decomposition reveals that the asymmetric division of labour significantly accounts for shifts in female partners’ relative hourly pay across phases: The female partner’s share of paid work operates as a suppressor that partially offsets negative direct effects, whereas her share of housework further reinforces relative pay disadvantage. This study contributes by (1) providing a multi-phase, couple-level account of how gendered arrangements unfold as families move through parenthood, bearing on ongoing debates between resource-based and gender-based explanations of couples’ division of labour, and (2) testing the mediation pathway linking parenthood phases to within-couple pay inequality and identifying when across the parenthood trajectory the reallocation of labour most strongly accounts for this inequality.
Published in
Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World
Volume
Volume: 12
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1177/23780231261461384
ISSN
23780231
Subjects
Notes
© The Author(s) 2026
Open Access
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
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