Does Children's Age Impact the Division of Housework?

ABSTRACT

In this study, we investigate couples' division of household tasks by the age of the youngest child, comparing France, eastern Germany, and western Germany. For our analyses, we draw on Generations and Gender Survey (GGS) data. As expected, our findings are that the division of housework is less egalitarian for couples with preschool age children than for childless couples, and these differences are greatest in western Germany. However, we had also expected the division of housework to be more egalitarian again for couples with older children, among whom maternal employment rates are higher than among those with younger children. Our findings confirmed this expectation for western Germany. Surprisingly though, we found that in both eastern Germany and France, the division of housework was actually continuously less egalitarian the older couples' children. An explanation may be that the traditionalizing impact of parenthood unfolds slowly with parenthood duration as couples increasingly yield to societal expectations regarding parental roles. In western Germany, where women reduce their employment most significantly when becoming mothers, employment status effects appear to dominate any other trends associated with the age of the youngest child.

Key words:

• division of household labor
• family models
• Germany
• France
• gender roles

Notes

¹ International comparative studies on gender and motherhood wage gaps usually do not differentiate between eastern and western Germany. On account of the greater population size in western Germany, findings for Germany are likely to more closely reflect the situation in western Germany.

² The GGS data used for this study were obtained from the GGP Data Archive. For a description of the survey instruments, see Generations & Gender Programme: Survey Instruments. United Nations (2005).

³ These robustness checks are not included in the paper in order to save space. However, they are available on request.

⁴ Men as well as women may overstate their own housework contributions (Batalova and Cohen 2002; Baxter 2005). We have therefore controlled for the respondent's gender in each model in order to correct for any potential biases that might be caused by uneven distributions of men and women across the samples.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Cordula Zabel

Cordula Zabel is a senior research scientist at the Institute for Employment Research (IAB), in Nuremberg, Germany. Previously, she was a Ph.D. student and a Post-Doc at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, Germany. Her research interests are in the fields of household dynamics, labor market transitions, and social policy.

Valerie K. Heintz-Martin

Valerie K. Heintz-Martin received her Ph.D. from McGill University in Montreal, Canada. Before joining the German Youth Institute (DJI) in Munich in 2011, she was an Assistant Professor at Bamberg University, Germany. Her research interests are in the areas of fertility, stepfamilies, international comparisons of family types, and life course research.