It should come as a surprise to no one that women bear more of the housekeeping burden than do the men with whom they share a bed. A new study from the Journal of Family Issues offers support for the conventional wisdom, but adds a new twist: married women report doing more household labor than do cohabiting women.
Feministing’s Jessica Valenti is “terrified” and “taken aback,” worrying that marriage somehow leads to an increased burden for wives. But,as Matt Yyglesias points out, she’s making a bad assumption here, as the study provides no evidence whatsoever to suggest that marriage actually causes (more) unequal divisions of labor.
First off, the study is a cross-sectional analysis, which means that it looks at people at one point in time. Given that the authors present a single snapshot of their respondents’ reported household duties, we’ve got no way of knowing whether there’s a causal link between wearing a wedding dress and pushing a broom around the kitchen. If we had before-and-after pictures of the same people, then we’d have something to work with since we’d be able to look at whether marriage fundamentally changed people’s housework burdens. But without this “before” period, all we’ve got is the “after.” And, as Matt implies, there are good reasons to believe that the “after” simply represents a selection effect — that is, couples who marry (as opposed to those who cohabit) are more likely to have “traditional” attitudes toward the gendered division of household labor.
Indeed, the study provides compelling reasons to believe that the difference between cohabiting and married women’s share of household labor stems from prior preferences. According to the authors’ analysis, married men and women are more likely than their cohabiting counterparts to hold “traditional” gender ideologies — e.g. more likely to agree that “A man’s job is to earn money; a woman’s job is to look after the home and family.” And, also unsurprisingly, the more traditional an individual’s gender ideology, the greater the burden of household labor borne by the female half of the couple. While it’s possible that gender ideologies change as a consequence of marriage, this seems like a stretch. More plausible is that, on average, folks who get married are simply a bit more conservative than cohabitors. Indeed, the same traditional attitudes that predict more housework for women may predict one’s likelihood of getting married (rather than living in sin). Of course, this is simply a hypothesis — to test it out would require before-and-after data of the sort I described above.
So: Jessica Valenti, fear not. Based on the newest data out there, you’ve got little reason to believe that marriage is going to turn you into a house-frau.