Sharing of Housework and Money Among Swedish Couples: Do They Behave Rationally?

The article deals with issues of intra-household sharing of work and money. The point of departure is taken from well-established theories about spouses’ relative market productivity, bargaining power and economic dependency. Data are from 1998 and were taken from a sample of Swedish households. A number of specific hypotheses were tested using structural modelling. Support for the tested theories was meagre. It could not be shown that differences in spouses’ relative market productivity or income dependency increase over time as a result of ongoing specialisation. Instead, the reverse seems to be true. Differences in spouses’ market productivity did not affect, in the expected way, the time they devoted to market work. On the contrary, the data suggest that the greater the difference in productivity, the lesser the difference in market work time. Neither did the assumption about a trade-off between housework sharing and money sharing materialise in the anticipated way. Instead of trading housework for money it seems that, contrary to the theory, access to money coincides with the ability to avoid housework. Throughout the analysis separate models were estimated for the ‘atypical’ household, in which the wife had the highest income/productivity. The results did challenge the assumption that the tested theories are gender neutral.