When Work Comes Home: Parental Time Allocated to Unpaid Household Labor

Abstract

I examined how dual-earner households manage the often-competing demands of work and family life through an in-depth analysis of time allocated to housework and child care while testing the theories of gender display and economic dependency. I developed new measures for occupational nurturance and authority and applied these measures to the housework and child care literature by conducting a series of replication studies. My work supports the relationship between employment characteristics and remaining gender inequalities in unpaid household labor. I was able to shed light on how dual-earner households attempt to manage the complicated work-family time bind, while adding to the field of replication studies in quantitative sociology. I constructed new measures for occupational nurturance and authority to offer alternative ways to assess occupational traits that were not mutually exclusive or dichotomous. I conducted year fixed effects multilevel models of General Social Survey (GSS) respondents nested within occupations. Using these models, I constructed empirical Bayes (EB) estimates of the occupational effects and aggregated the data set at the occupation-level for easy merging to any data set using Census occupation codes. I showed the utility of my new measures by merging them to the National Survey of Families and Households (NSFH) and American Time Use Survey (ATUS) for further analysis. I found overwhelming support for gender conventionality for married men and women working in gender atypical occupations who displayed less stereotypical gendered behavior at home. However, separate from occupational sex composition, my findings also provided support for the influence of gender ideology on married men and women’s gendered display of housework at home. For child care, I found consistent and overwhelming support for fathers’ and mothers’ time spent with children and economic dependency’s time availability perspective. These results illuminated the “time crunch” that dual-earners face as they juggle work and family obligations. Across both studies of unpaid household labor, the overall findings suggest a gendered picture. Married women completed more housework than married men, and mothers completed more child care than fathers. The housework findings were further supported by gender ideology, or that those with more traditional views on housework and family life completed more traditionally gendered housework tasks. Although, my findings also suggested more nuanced housework for those in gender atypical workplaces in support of gender conventionality. Finally, even though I found strong support for economic dependency’s time availability perspective for time spent with children in dual-earner households, mothers still completed more child care than fathers regardless of all other factors further highlighting a stalled revolution for working mothers. Women made strides in the workplace, but still faced gendered unpaid household labor at home. Throughout my studies, I added new measures to the field and I built on the great work of leaders in the field of housework and child care through replication. I conducted robustness and generalizability checks of prior work and made a case for replication studies in quantitative sociology.