Care&Careers: Housework Distribution and Occupational Success

• In Event: 2266 - Family Section Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 9. Gender Division Labor and Women's Career Interruption

Abstract

Existing sociological research has explained the unequal division of unpaid work between men and women among others with differences in relative resources and time availability. Numerous theoretical and empirical studies alike claim an influence of (potential) labor market success on household arrangements. We challenge a strictly monocausal interpretation of this relationship by investigating the influence of the division of unpaid work in different-sex couples on various labor market outcomes: A more equal distribution of unpaid work is argued to free time resources of the primary providers of housework – in most cases women – and to enhance their labor market participation and employment careers. Besides providing causal evidence for an effect of unpaid on paid work a major contribution of this paper is to exploit recent longitudinal data and dedicate particular attention to the accompanying methodological difficulties.
Based on SOEP data for the years 2001-2015 we investigate the effects of different care work distributions within different-sex couple households in Germany on their employment probability as well as the actual working hours, hourly wages and labor earnings of employed couples. Applying instrumental variable regressions with fixed individual and time effects that include controls for individual and household characteristics allows to account for the endogeneity of an individual’s time spent in housework. According to our findings the labor market participation of men and women as well as their actual hours worked and individual labor earnings are negatively affected by their own and positively affected by their spouses’ time spend in housework. The effects are more pronounced for women. A more equal distribution of housework within couples would thus imply a substantial step towards more gender equality on the labor market.

Authors

• Claire Samtleben, German Institute for Economic Research

• Kai-Uwe Müller, German Institute for Economic Research