New research from Wharton associate professor of business economics and public policy Corinne Low links unequal domestic workloads to stalled progress on closing the wage gap—and even declining marriage rates.
2 min. read
Two decades of stalled progress on closing the U.S. gender pay gap may have less to do with the office and more to do with the kitchen sink.
A study from Corinne Low, associate professor of business economics and public policy at the Wharton School, shows that in heterosexual couples, men don’t take on more housework when women earn more—an imbalance that can reduce the time women have for paid work.
Today, men average roughly eight hours of housework a week, while women do about 20. In dual-earning couples, men do about the same housework when they earn 20% of the household income as they do when they earn 80%. Nor has there been a big shift in men’s chore-doing over time: They do about the same amount of housework today as they did in the 1980s.
As women’s earning power has grown over time, this leaves many “winning the bread and baking it too,” which is also the title of Low’s study. Low describes how this squeeze, especially when children are young, can push women to reduce their hours or step away from demanding career paths, such as law, finance, or senior management. The paper finds that even when a woman’s wage is more than twice her partner’s, she still works fewer hours than he does.
Low’s study rules out some practical limits as the cause of the imbalance in chores. The imbalance holds, for example, when both partners have a college education and above-average income to pay for help. It also appears in couples without kids and in those whose children are older than five, suggesting that factors like maternity leave or breastfeeding are not the main explanation.
Low says the data instead points to “gender norms”—meaning women still do more housework because of ingrained social expectations, even when it does not make practical or financial sense for the household.
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