Abstract
The quality of survey data depends on the way information is collected. Interviewers are instructed to ensure that the interviews take place in private without anyone else present. However, they cannot impose the interview conditions, and in many cases one or more other persons are present during all or part of the interview.
This chapter compares women’s and men’s responses about the division of household tasks and seeks to measure the bias introduced by the presence of a third person (usually the respondent’s partner) during the interview. The results suggest that the partner’s presence exercises a certain “control” over the respondent’s answers, while his or her absence encourages the respondent to “idealize” by presenting a more equal division of tasks, more in keeping with a certain egalitarian standard.
A longer version of this chapter was published in French in 2007 in Economie et Statistique No. 407. The results shown here are reproduced with the kind permission of INSEE.
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- 1.
The same analysis was performed on the division of childcare tasks (Régnier-Loilier and Guisse 2009) and yielded similar conclusions. We chose the example of household chores for reasons of numbers, since the module on childcare tasks was limited to respondents in a union with at least one child aged under 15 living in the household ( n = 2,391 compared with 6,088 for the “household organization” module).
- 2.
According to Eurobarometer, 58 % of men in France report not doing any household chores and the proportion is 61 % according to their partners. The reporting differences vary considerably between countries. In Germany, for example, the gender gap in reporting is 20 points (43 % when the man answers versus 63 % when the woman answers). In Belgium, no gender gap in reporting is observed (61 %).
- 3.
We limit our demonstration here to the “always the woman” response, since the aim is to show that there is a significant bias in the responses, regardless of which responses they are. The frequency of the other response categories can be gauged implicitly from the frequency of the “always the woman” response.
- 4.
We saw above that the differences observed for the “always the woman” response and the combination of “always the woman” and “usually the woman” responses did not alter the structure of the biases. In order to have sufficient numbers in the different categories, particularly for doing small repairs, these two categories were grouped together.
- 5.
We know that the division of tasks tends to be slightly less unequal over generations, but that the woman’s withdrawal from the workforce (parental or maternity leave, decision to stay at home, unemployment) and the number of dependent children are correlated with a lower participation of the male partner in the domestic sphere (Brousse 1999; see also Régnier-Loilier, Chap. 12).
- 6.
This result could be contested by saying that the division of tasks may depend on age not cohort. We note, however, that some studies confirm a slight increase in male participation in household chores, even if women still do the lion’s share (Ponthieux and Schreiber 2006). Over 30 years, from 1966 to 1998, the percentage of men contributing to household chores increased from 19 % to 31 % (Chenu 2002).
- 7.
The man’s share of household chores is 22 % when only the man is working, 35 % when both partners are working, 39 % when neither is employed and 53 % when only the woman is employed (Brousse 1999).
- 8.
In the survey, “in a cohabiting relationship” was defined as having lived under the same roof for at least three consecutive months (see Solaz, Chap. 10).
- 9.
Usually the month is indicated; and there are fewer “Don’t know” responses.
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Régnier-Loilier, A. (2015). How Are Household Chores Divided? Responses Vary with the Respondent’s Gender and the Partner’s Presence or Absence During the Interview. In: Régnier-Loilier, A. (eds) The Contemporary Family in France. INED Population Studies, vol 5. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09528-8_8
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