Gender divisions of domestic labour and paid domestic services

ABSTRACT

This article investigates the relationship between the sharing of domestic tasks in dual-earner mixed-sex couples and the use of paid domestic services. Using results from a small-scale survey of the domestic outsourcing practices of employees of a large service-sector organisation in the UK, we find that in households: full-time working by women and presence of younger children is positively associated with the use of paid domestic services; there is no association between the gender division of traditionally female domestic tasks carried out within the couple and use of paid services; but in contrast, greater male involvement in traditionally male and traditionally gender-neutral tasks is positively associating with using paid domestic services. These findings tentatively suggest that a new arrangement may be emerging in which some couples address a heavy workload and a desire for a less traditional division of domestic labour by men participating more in close-ended domestic tasks and outsourcing the more time-consuming tasks traditionally undertaken by women to paid-service providers.

KEYWORDS:

• Domestic labour
• domestic services
• dual-earner couple
• gender
• divisions of labour

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. See ‘Acknowledgements’ for further details

2. Overall, 30% of the respondents answered that they outsourced at least one of these tasks: cleaning (24%), ironing (13%) and gardening (9%).

3. As an additional robustness analysis we have re-run our multivariate analysis including as an additional category in the three indices (6) for those few cases (15% or less for each task) where the respondents report that each of the tasks making up the indices are being done by someone else (neither the respondent nor the spouse) such as another unpaid household member, friend or family unpaid or someone who is paid. The results with regards to how the couple share the tasks and its impact on the likelihood of outsourcing for the three indices confirm the main results found with the specification of the indices used in the article. Furthermore, respondents are asked only for whether they are outsourcing a limited number of domestic chores: cleaning, laundry, ironing, and gardening, and an additional other category. Out of the four three (cleaning, laundry and ironing) are part of the DDL Index of activities done mainly by women while gardening is part of the DDL Index of activities done mainly by men. This means that for the gender-neutral DDL Index the analysis is only a rough approximation for the likelihood of outsourcing those activities (everyday tidying, shopping, and washing up) assuming that these are classified in the default other category in the question we use as our dependent variable: ‘What type of work is undertaken by this person/these people you employ?’ The response options are: cleaning, laundry, ironing, gardening and other.

4. The three indices used in the analysis consider only cases where the two spouses report a certain level of sharing the tasks between them (categories 1–5 above). The robustness analysis outlined in footnote 3 includes an additional category (6) where the spouses report the tasks being done by someone else outside the couple, either paid or unpaid. This category 6 collapses options that are very different in nature but there are very few cases.

5. Some of the variance in men’s and women’s responses may also be due to self-selection of respondents.

6. Further exploration of the relationship between the presence of children in the household and the use of childcare arrangements is reported in Table A1 in the appendix where both variables are added sequentially. This indicates that for the outsourcing of activities mainly done by women there may be an issue of simultaneous causation (which translates in high multicolinarity). However, for the other two indices results are consistent with our substantive interpretation as the presence of children increases the odds of outsourcing but once childcare arrangements are introduced in the final model for each index the positive effect of children in the odds of outsourcing vanishes. The issue of multicolinearity for the index of activities mainly done by women does not affect the key results of the paper as in this case no significant results for the odds of outsourcing were found.

Additional information

Funding

This article uses the results of a survey funded by Creative Sheffield, a city development company, part owned by Sheffield City Council, responsible for the economic development of Sheffield, as part of an initiative to evaluate the opportunities for new enterprise creation in the household services sector. The usual disclaimers apply.