Racial-Ethnic Differences in U.S. Married Women’s and Men’s Housework

Liana C. Sayer, Ohio State University
Leigh Fine, Ohio State University

Black husbands do more housework than white husbands but Black wives do no more housework than White wives (John and Shelton 1997; Orbuch and Custer 1995; Orbuch and Eyster 1997). Studies are limited because they do not explore how race-ethnicity affects housework, they compare only Blacks and Whites, and they overlook timing and duration of housework. We use time diary data from the 2003-2007 ATUS to address these limitations. We hypothesize one source of racial-ethnic variation in household work is disparate employment conditions and also anticipate the association of economic resources and housework may differ by race-ethnicity. Preliminary results indicate race-ethnicity affects hours of housework and associations of earnings with housework vary among women by race-ethnicity. We will extend early results with OLS and event history models to estimate racial-ethnic variation in hours, engagement in, and the timing and duration of housework and how these are conditioned by economic resources.