Abstract
Intergenerational transmission has been successfully employed in economic research to explain the persistence of certain economic behaviors across generations. This paper evaluates the relevance of this transmission process in the formation of gender roles during childhood. In particular, we analyze the relationship between parents’ and children’s housework allocation patterns. We propose a simple theoretical model that predicts that parents with a strong adherence to gender to traditional gender norms—as proxied by their division of household labor—are more likely to allocate housework to children in a way that reflects stereotypes of men’s and women’s domestic tasks. The empirical application is carried out with data from the 2002–2003 Spanish Time Use Survey. The sample restricts to two-parent households with at least one child aged 10–17 years. We find a significant positive correlation between a more egalitarian parents’ allocation of housework and a less asymmetrical distribution of domestic chores between sons and daughters.
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Notes
Outside the field of economics, Cunningham (2001) shows that the parental division of labor when a son was growing up affects the adult son’s participation in routine housework once he marries; Gupta (2006) finds that men who are married or cohabiting and who were exposed to maternal employment during childhood spend more time on housework as adults than do other men.
Ideally, we should specify a model in which children’s housework time is explained by the mother’s participation in the labor market and the father’s participation in household labor, since these are the parents’ time uses that best define gender roles at home. But because time allocation decisions within the household are likely to be made simultaneously, estimating such a model would require data that are unavailable in the STUS (i.e., variables that might explain the mother’s decision to participate in the labor market but do not also explain father’s and children’s time spent on housework).
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Financial support from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation grant no. ECO2008-05771 and from Consellería de Innovación e Industria (Xunta de Galicia) grant no. PGIDIT06PXIB300217PR is gratefully acknowledged.
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Álvarez, B., Miles-Touya, D. Exploring the relationship between parents’ and children’s housework time in Spain. Rev Econ Household 10, 299–318 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11150-011-9135-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11150-011-9135-4