Do women face a glass ceiling at home? The division of household labor among dual-earner couples

Tomáš Lichard, Filip Pertold () and Samuel Škoda
Additional contact information
Filip Pertold: Center for Economic Research and Graduate Education—Economics Institute (CERGE-EI), a joint workplace of Charles University in Prague and the Economics Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences

Review of Economics of the Household, 2021, vol. 19, issue 4, No 10, 1209-1243

Abstract: Abstract In this paper, we use data on mixed-gender dual-earner couples in Southern and Western Europe to investigate how the division of unpaid household labor within mixed-gender couples varies depending on the ratio of the partners’ market wages. From analysis of the EU Statistics on Income and Living Conditions, we first show that married or cohabiting women do twice as much household work as single women with the same income. Furthermore, women’s time spent in home production does not vary in relation to the couple’s relative wages in Southern Europe. We find a positive elasticity of substitution between male and female labor in home production with respect to their relative within-couple wages in Western Europe. Our identification is based on predicting each country’s wage distributions within gender-specific cells defined by age group and education using distributions in all the other countries. We present a positive evidence for presence of a “second-shift” that women face especially in Southern Europe, which may stem from regional gender norms.

Keywords: Household production; Division of labor; Gender gap; Elasticity of substitution (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D13 J12 J16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11150-021-09558-7 Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Do Women Face a Glass Ceiling at Home? The Division of Household Labor among Dual-Earner Couples (2020)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:reveho:v:19:y:2021:i:4:d:10.1007_s11150-021-09558-7

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... cs/journal/11150/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s11150-021-09558-7

Access Statistics for this article

Review of Economics of the Household is currently edited by Shoshana Grossbard

More articles in Review of Economics of the Household from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().