Gender Norms and Relative Working Hours: Why Do Women Suffer More Than Men from Working Longer Hours Than Their Partners?

Sarah Flèche, Anthony Lepinteur and Nattavudh Powdthavee

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: Constraints that prevent women from working longer hours are argued to be important drivers of the gender wage gap in the United States. We provide evidence that in couples where the wife's working hours exceed the husband's, the wife reports lower life satisfaction. By contrast, there is no effect on the husband's satisfaction. The results still hold when controlling for relative income. We argue that these patterns are best explained by perceived fairness of the division of household labor, which induces an aversion to a situation where the wife works more at home and on the labor market.

Date: 2018
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://amu.hal.science/hal-01989243v1
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

Published in American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings, 2018, 108, pp.163-68. ⟨10.1257/pandp.20181098⟩

Downloads: (external link)
https://amu.hal.science/hal-01989243v1/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Gender Norms and Relative Working Hours: Why Do Women Suffer More Than Men from Working Longer Hours Than Their Partners? (2018)
Working Paper: Gender Norms and Relative Working Hours: Why Do Women Suffer More Than Men from Working Longer Hours Than Their Partners? (2018)
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:hal:journl:hal-01989243

DOI: 10.1257/pandp.20181098

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().