Opting Out and Buying Out: Spouses’ Profits and Housework Time

Opting Out and Buying Out: Spouses’ Profits and Housework Time

Alexandra Killewald

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It was proposed that the negative relationship between spouses’ earnings and their amount of time in housework is because of greater outsourcing of home work by households with high-earning spouses, but this theory is not tested straight. In an example of dual-earner married people into the Consumption and strategies Mail Survey for the health insurance and Retirement learn (N = 796), utilization of market substitutes for women’s housework ended up being discovered become just weakly related to wives’ time cooking and cleansing. Moreover, expenditures on market substitutes explain lower than 15% associated with the earnings–housework time relationship. This shows that usage of market substitutes plays an inferior part in describing variation in wives’ time in household work than has formerly been hypothesized.

Spouses continue steadily to spend more time than their husbands doing housework, even if both spouses work full-time (Kamo, 1988; Killewald & Gough, 2010). For all those partners, domestic work is a way to obtain sex stratification, because it plays a role in unequal free time between partners. Moreover, spouses’ amount of time in housework is adversely related to wages, hence making women’s greater domestic burden a factor into the sex gap in wages (Hersch & Stratton, 1997; Noonan, 2001).

Hence natural to inquire about exactly what resources spouses could use to lessen their amount of time in household work. Current studies suggest that spouses’ earnings are negatively connected with their amount of time in housework, even with managing for time invested in market work (Gupta, 2006, 2007; Killewald & Gough, 2010). Considering that spouses’ earnings are favorably connected with home expenditures on market substitutes with regards to their home work and negatively related to their amount of time in housework, it’s been hypothesized that spouses’ earnings permit them to outsource household production (Cohen, 1998; de Ruijter, Treas, & Cohen, 2005; Gupta, 2006, 2007; Gupta & Ash, 2008): Wives use their profits to get away from amount of time in housework. Continuer la lecture de « Opting Out and Buying Out: Spouses’ Profits and Housework Time »