Attempting to Explain Women’s Perceptions of the Fairness of the Division of Housework

This article attempts to explain why the great majority of women say the division of housework is fair even though they are usually bearing a disproportionate share of that work. Data for the study were collected from two sets of Melbourne women who expressed opposite views on the fairness of the division of housework in their marriages. Yet, the unpaid workloads of both the women who said the division was fair and those who said it was unfair were similar. The judgements of both sets of women were broadly based: they usually had more to do with their experience across many areas of their marriage than with their unpaid workload. The paper corroborates Linda Thompson’s (1991) argument that women will only have a sense of injustice about the division of housework if they are being deprived of outcomes from their relationship that they value highly, believe there is no justification for being deprived of such outcomes, and make intergender rather than intragender comparisons when assessing the justice of their situation.