Abstract
In recent years, American women’s housework time has declined while American men’s housework time has risen. We examine how these changes have affected economic inequality in the United States. Using time-diary data from the Time Use in Economic and Social Accounts, 1975–1976 (N = 1,484) and the American Time Use Survey, 2003 (N = 5,534), we value adults’ housework using two alternative methodologies and assess its influence on households’ real access to goods and services in both years. Results suggest that housework reduces economic inequality in both years. But, between 1975–1976 and 2002–2003, overall economic inequality rose largely because of the growing wage inequality and also, in part, because of growth in housework inequality. Socio-demographic change partially inhibited the overall growth in economic inequality.
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Notes
While Gottschalk and Mayer attempt to ameliorate this potential defect in one of their estimates by including all leisure as household work, this is a second best solution.
While some authors have analyzed time diary data from the Americans’ Use of Time, 1965–1966 survey, these data cannot be used to generalize to the nation as a whole. Approximately one-third of the sample in that study was drawn from Jackson, MI, while the remaining two-thirds were drawn from a national sample of individuals living in cities with a population between 30,000 and 280,000. See Converse and Robinson (1980) for further information regarding this study.
As we noted earlier, some have argued that childcare and shopping should be excluded from housework because these tasks provide direct utility for many individuals. Pet lovers, hobbyists, cooking enthusiasts, and gardeners give lie to this distinction. While we readily admit that some individuals consider certain household tasks to be sources of leisure, the tasks included in our definition of housework are primarily production rather than consumption activities. Moreover, it is beyond the scope of this paper to parse out consumption from production within these categories.
All 1975–1976 figures have been inflated to 2002 dollars using the Personal Consumption Expenditure Deflator (St. Louis Federal Reserve 2007). The replacement wage regressions are available from the authors upon request.
Estimated equations are available from the authors upon request.
If the federal income tax system is progressive, then the Gini Coefficient associated with gross income should be larger than the Gini Coefficient associated with after-tax income.
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Acknowledgement
We wish to thank Philip N. Cohen for sharing his SAS code used to compute Gini coefficients.
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Zick, C.D., Bryant, W.K. & Srisukhumbowornchai, S. Does housework matter anymore? The shifting impact of housework on economic inequality. Rev Econ Household 6, 1–28 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11150-007-9020-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11150-007-9020-3