Division of Household Labor and Marital Quality: How Do Gender, Race, and Life Course Stage Matter?

• In Event: 220 - Section on the Sociology of the Family Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 08. The Division of Household Labor

Abstract

The amount of household labor performed in marriage has been clearly associated with multiple individual and couple-level outcomes, including marital quality. Most research on the relationship between household labor and marital quality is cross-sectional and takes a broad view of married couples, failing to show how this relationship may differ at the intersection of spouses’ gender, race, and life course stage. This lack of attention to difference among the married prevents a comprehensive view of how the division of labor matters for marital quality among various subgroups. To address this research gap, we use four waves of national longitudinal data (Americans’ Changing Lives, N = 1,083) to test how the division of labor matters for marital quality over time, as well as and how this relationship differs by gender, race, and life course stage. We find that time spent on routine housework does not affect white men’s martial quality at any life course stage, but baseline routine housework accelerates the rate marital quality decline among black men in later-life. Housework actually protects early-adult white women and mid-life black women’s marital quality. We also use ACL and Cox proportional hazards model (N=1,976) to examine the relationship between housework hours and hazards of divorce. We find that doing more routine housework is associated with lower odds of divorce only among young-adult black women.

Author

• Zhe Zhang, Ohio State University