When Does Gender Trump Money? Bargaining and Time in Household Work1

By M. Bittman, P. England, Liana C. Sayer, N. Folbre, G. Matheson. American Journal of Sociology, 2003

1,349 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Using data from Australia and the United States, the authors explore the effect of spouses’ contribution to family income on how housework is divided. Consistent with exchange‐bargaining theory, women decrease their housework as their earnings increase, up to the point where both spouses contribute equally to income. In other respects, gender trumps money. The base level of housework for women is much higher. Among the small percentage of couples who are in the range where women provide 51%–100% of household income, the change in housework is opposite what exchange theory predicts: couples that deviate from the normative income standard (men make more money than women) seem to compensate with a more traditional division of household work.

Subfields: Finance, Gender Studies, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d5b5203da4ff6abf95a6ffff76735bf51d2f0ccb

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Citations in the corpus

Own Gender, Sibling’s Gender, Parent’s Gender (2017, background): “The majority of time use studies, including studies on the gender division of family labor, focus on absolute hours (e.g., Bittman et al. 2003; Brines 1994).”
Does gender trump money? Housework hours of husbands and wives in Britain: (2008, background): “Nevertheless, Bittman et al. (2003), using Australian data, found curvilinear relationships between relative earnings and housework hours only in the case of married women but not in the case of married men.”
Negotiating Domestic Labor: Women's Earnings and Housework Time in Australia (2012, methodology): “Many studies have found support for a process of gender display; according to this approach, the performance of housework affirms women’s identity as feminine, whereas not doing housework affirms men’s identity as masculine (Sanjiv Gupta 1999; Bittman et al. 2003; Man Yee Kan 2008; Almudena Sevilla-”
Gender Identity and Relative Income within Households (2013, methodology): “Bittman et al. (2003) report that the extent of the wife’s housework decreases in relative income when she makes less than the husband, but that this relationship reverses when relative income exceeds one half.”
The Power of the Purse (2006, background): “In the intervening years since Ferree’s review, a great deal of research attention in the United States has been paid to the first two of these issues, as well as possible relationships between them (Bittman et al. 2003; Brines 1994; South and Spitze 1994; Waldfogel 1997), but control over household”
A World of Difference: International Trends in Women's Economic Status (2011, background): “…cultural contexts, housework and child care are among the most genderspecialized of work activities, and the domestic sphere remains a central front on which norms of masculinity and femininity are affirmed and contested (Bittman et al. 2003, Charles & Cech 2010, Treas & Drobnič 2010).”
Changing the Division of Household Labor: A Negotiated Process Between Partners (2007, background): “Gender construction theorists explain this curvilinear relationship as couples’ attempts to reduce the threat to the husbands’ masculinity and to reaffirm the wives’ femininity in the face of their “masculine” income-generating behavior ( Bittman et al., 2003; Brines, 1994; Ferree, 1990; Thompson &”
Gender Stereotypes. (2018, background): “For instance, when women start earning more money than their husbands, they increase (rather than decrease) the amount of time they invest in household work, presumably to avoid violating stereotypical expectations of a good wife (Bittman et al. 2003).”
Spousal influences on parents’ non-market time choices (2007, background): “Bittman et al. (2003) report that in 1992, Australian wives averaged 23 hours of housework a week compared to 11 hours for their husbands.”
Whose money, whose time? A nonparametric approach to modeling time spent on housework in the United States (2006, neutral): “Notes: The dependent variable in the studies by Bittman et al. (2003), Brines (1994), and Evertsson and Nermo (2004) is absolute housework hours. Greenstein (2000) uses both absolute and share measures of housework hours; the table entry is based on the results for the distributional measure.”
Gender Roles and the Division of Unpaid Work in Spanish Households (2010, background): “Unlike in the US studies, Bittman et al. (2003) use a sample of Australian couples and find that it is the woman’s housework (not the man’s) that increases when she contributes more than 50 percent to household income. Their results are robust to different sample considerations. In comparing their r”
Race and Gender in Families and at Work (2008, background): “At the point at which wives earn more than their husbands, however, husbands reduce the amount of time that they spend in household labor to compensate for their diminished breadwinning status (Bittman et al. 2003; Brines 1994; Tichenor 2005).”