 Gender Wage Gap and the Involvement of Partners in Household WorkEleonora Matteazzi and
Stefani Scherer
Work, Employment & Society, 2021, vol. 35, issue 3, 490-508 Abstract: Women still earn less than men and continue to perform the bulk of domestic activities. Several studies documented a negative individual wage–housework relation, suggesting that gender discrepancies in housework may explain the gender wage gap. Less attention has been paid to the role of the partner’s unpaid work and to the extent that intra-household inequalities relate to inequalities outside the house. The present study attempts to fill this gap in the literature. We exploit EU-SILC 2010 data for Germany and Italy and PSID 2009 data for the US. Results suggest the importance of accounting for a partner’s housework when evaluating the determinants of individual wages and the gender wage gap. Women seem not to profit from their partners’ housework; instead, women’s non-market work increases their partners’ earnings while decreasing their own earnings. This suggests the importance of reducing women’s involvement in domestic work in order to close gender wage equalities. Keywords: gender wage gap; household work; within-couple wage gap (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:woemps:v:35:y:2021:i:3:p:490-508 Access Statistics for this article More articles in Work, Employment & Society from British Sociological Association |
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