The Distribution of Household Tasks

This article examines the relationship between wives' employment status and their own and their husbands' time spent on specific household tasks. Using Multiple Classification Analysis, we compared the adjusted mean time that women and men spend in a variety of specific household tasks. The findings showed that gender roles are somewhat more egalitarian in households where women are employed than can be discerned from analyses of only total housework and child-care time. Employed women spend less time on female-typed tasks than full-time homemakers, while their time spent on male-typed or neutral tasks is generally not significantly different from that of full-time homemakers. The findings also showed that men's total housework time does not vary by wives' employment status and that wives' employment also seems to have little effect on their husbands' time spent on specific tasks.