Influences of gender ideology and housework allocation on women’s employment over the life course
Influences of gender ideology and housework allocation on women’s employment over the life course
Key takeaways
Bibliography: Cunningham, M., 2008. Influences of gender ideology and housework allocation on women’s employment over the life course. Social Science Research 37, 254–267. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssresearch.2007.01.003
Authors:: Mick Cunningham
Collections:: Gender Scale
First-page: 1
The study investigates the influences of women’s attitudes about gender and couples’ housework allocation patterns on women’s employment status and work hours across the life course. The influence of these factors on the employment characteristics of continuously married women is investigated at four time points: 1977, 1980, 1985, and 1993. Data come from the Intergenerational Panel Study of Parents and Children and the analysis sample includes 556 continuously married women. Findings from structural equation, fixed effects, and tobit models offer consistent evidence of long-term positive influences of women’s egalitarian gender ideology and men’s participation in routine housework on women’s labor force participation. The results provide support for hypotheses based on the notion of lagged adaptation.
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Reading notes
Imported on 2025-04-27 17:41
⭐ Important
- & the amount and relative proportion of household labor they performed decreased (Artis and Pavalko, 2003; Sayer, Robinson, and Bianchi 2005), and their support for gender differentiated family roles declined (Brewster and Padavic, 2000; Brooks and Bolzendahl, 2004; Thornton and Young-DeMarco, 2001). (p. 1)
- & Another major dimension of gender relations in families that is expected to be linked to women’s employment is the gendered division of family work. Although individual attitudes about gender and gendered patterns of household labor may be related, they are clearly separate constructs. Indeed, not all studies find an association between the two (Shelton and John, 1993). (p. 2)
- & Several cross-sectional studies have suggested that housework performance is negatively associated with women’s wages (Coverman 1983; Hersch 1991; Hersch and Stratton 1994; McAllister 1990; Shelton and Firestone 1988a), and a smaller number of studies have documented an association between women’s housework obligations and women’s employment hours (Kalleberg and Rosenfeld 1990; Shelton and Firestone 1988b). (p. 3)
- & Recent research by Stratton (2001) suggests that the primary mechanism through which housework is related to wages is that responsibility for routine housework leaves less time available for paid work. However, because the key variables in these cross-sectional studies are measured simultaneously, it is difficult to establish the timeordering that is necessary for making causal attributions. (p. 3)
- & Women’s attitudes about gender in families are assessed with 2 items in 1962 and with 6 items in 1977, 1980, and 1985 (see Appendix for text). The items are coded so that a high score represents lower levels of support for the male breadwinner, female homemaker family model. In some models these items are included as individually-observed indicators, and in other models they are summed into an index. The six items from 1977 appear to measure a single underlying construct in 1977 (Cronbach’s alpha = .76; see Figure 1 for factor loadings), (p. 4)
⛔ Weaknesses and caveats
- ! I focus primarily on the causal influence of couples’ relative participation in stereotypically female housework, because this kind of work must be performed frequently and has a low level of “schedule control” for its completion (Barnett & Shen, 1997). In addition, research by Noonan (2001) suggests that it is time spent on these kinds of “feminine” tasks that has the greatest influence on wages. (p. 3)