A Residue of Tradition: Jobs, Careers, and Spouses' Time in Housework

Abstract

This study compares the amount of time dual-career husbands and wives spend in housework, relative to their same-sex counterparts in other dual-earner and single-earner households. Data on 1,565 white couples drawn from the 1976 wave of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics were entered into a multiple regression analysis of husbands' and wives' weekly hours of housework. Across couple types, wives spent considerably more hours in housework than husbands and performed about 79% of all the housework that was done in their homes. Dual-career wives performed significantly fewer hours of housework each week than did full-time housewives, but they did not differ significantly from other fulltime employed wives. Dual-career husbands only differed significantly in their household labor from nonprofessional or nonmanagerial husbands of full-time housewives. They did not allocate significantly more time to housework each week than professional or managerial husbands married to housewives or than husbands in other dual-earner families in which the wives had nonprofessional/nonmanagerialjobs. Dual-career couples were not found to be more egalitarian than other couples in their allocation of time to household labor. Consequences of these findings for the extent of viability of the dual-career family form are discussed.