Relationship of Couples' Housework in 17 Countries

Yukiko Asai, the University of Tokyo
Masaaki Mizuochi, Mie University
Junya Tsutsui, Ritsumeikan University

The focus of our analysis is the effect of husbands’ housework hours on those of wives’ and the factors explaining the nation-level variation of that effect. The authors of this paper propose a hypothesis stipulating that there is a cross-level interaction between individual effect of husbands’ housework and nation-level factors. Multilevel modeling technique is used to explain macro-level variance of intercept and coefficient by macro-level variables. Using the ISSP-2002 for 17 countries, the authors find that the nation-level variance cannot be explained by gender-egalitarian related variable like GEM and GDI. On the other hand, the national average of relative income by gender explains the substantive part of the nation level variance. Those findings reveal the relevance of the economic efficiency theory for explaining the couples’ housework allocation. Husbands do less housework because it is economically efficient regarding the relative income gap between men and women.

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Presented in Poster Session 7