A Key to Couple Satisfaction: A Comparison of Equality in Domestic Work in Spain and Sweden

Despite advances in gender equality in the public sphere, the division of domestic labour remains unequal inside households. This situation can create wellbeing—or discontent—in couples, especially among women. In this number of Perspectives Demogràfiques, we analyse data from Spain and Sweden when exploring how men and women perceive the distribution of domestic tasks and the degree of satisfaction they show in this regard. The present study is the result of a joint project of researchers from the Centre for Demographic Studies (CED-CERCA) of the Autonomous University of Barcelona1 and from Stockholm University who have compared data from two nationally representative surveys: the 2018 Fertility Survey (Spain) and the 2021 Generations and Gender Survey (Sweden). Two research questions guide this study. The first is, how do men and women in the two countries perceive the division of household tasks? The second is, how do levels of satisfaction vary depending on the type of division and country of reference? Differences by gender, age, and country are analysed as is the interaction between the type of distribution of tasks and the satisfaction reported. The initial results clearly show that perception of equality in the distribution is associated with greater satisfaction for both genders and in both countries. Conversely, when there is an imbalance, women—especially in Spain— report lower satisfaction than men. The data also indicate that younger couples perceive a more equal distribution but this does not necessarily imply either convergence between the countries or greater satisfaction when there is imbalance.