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INTRODUCTION
This paper combines sociological and economic analysis of household behaviour, to study the division of unpaid housework within the family Regarding household decisions, mainstream economists and many sociologists have some common ground: both assume a husband's preferences can differ from a wife's preferences, and each spouse seeks his/her own way by threatening divorce (or other sanctions) against their partner. It is claimed by some writers (e.g., Evertsson & Nermo, 2004) that a woman's earnings can give her power; this is implied by bargaining models popular in economics and sociology. However, other writers (e.g., Bittman et al., 2003; Kerr, 2005; Martineiii «fe Parker, 2003) find such explanations inadequate to explain household behaviour, and add analysis based on gender.
This paper investigates the 'gender neutralization hypothesis', which claims attitudes to gender roles distorts the amount of housework done by men and women. Evertsson & Nermo (2004: 1273) wrote "women and men take part in gender deviance neutralizing behavior; that is, they exaggerate behaviors that contradict a deviant economic identity (e.g., breadwinner wife and supported husband). In these unconventional families, women do more housework than predicted by their labor market work hours and relative resource models, whereas men do less". If a woman earns more than her husband, we might expect her to do less housework-and her husband to do most of the unpaid housework-because she can use her earning power to bargain for a distribution of unpaid work which she prefers. However, several writers (e.g., Evertsson & Nermo, 2004; Shelton & John, 1996; Zuo & Bian, 2001) claim that most households behave quite differently, if the wife is the main earner: she does a much larger fraction of housework than mainstream economic and sociological bargaining models suggest.
This paper focuses on households containing a heterosexual couple (married or cohabiting: the terms 'spouse', husband', 'wife', and 'married' in this paper refer to cohabiting or married people). Data from household surveys in seven countries are used, to investigate how the distribution of unpaid work is related to the share of household income earned by the wife and by the husband. This paper uses data for the six countries covered in recent 'Work Attitudes & Spending' surveys, and 'British Household Panel Survey' data for Britain.
This paper also investigates...