A Tale of Two Sweepers: Parsing Divergent Impacts of Housework on Marital Satisfaction by Gender

• In Event: 3523 - Family Section Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 min): Table 6: Household Division of Labor

Abstract

Previous research attempted to explain the relationship between housework and marital satisfaction through the lens of fairness, claiming that whether or not the distribution of chores was perceived as egalitarian impacted spouses’ happiness. I suggest that housework hours impact marital satisfaction not as a proxy of fairness, but as an enactment of gender whereby increasing housework makes women unhappy as a gender conformant activity, while men benefit from it as gender atypical. In this study I apply a fixed methods approach to 5 waves of panel data collected over 25 years, examining if the change in someone’s amount of housework over time influences marital satisfaction irrespective of the actual number of hours. I find that even small increases in women’s time spent on chores decrease their chances of marital satisfaction, even if the total time spent on housework is below average. Surprisingly, men’s marital satisfaction increases along with housework, even when they end up spending 40 hours a week on chores. This divergent relationship is not explained by income, education or employment status of either of the spouses.

Author

• Anna Gabur, University of Notre Dame