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I examine the contested finding that men and women engage in gender performance through housework. Prior scholarship has found a curvilinear association between earnings share and housework that has been interpreted as evidence of gender performance. I reexamine these findings by conducting the first such analysis to use high-quality time diary data for a U.S. sample in the contemporary period. Drawing on data on 11,868 married women and 10,770 married men in the American Time Use Survey (2003-2007), I find no evidence that married men "'do gender" through housework. I do, however, find strong evidence of gender performance among women as evidenced by a curvilinear association between earnings share and women's housework time.
Key Words: family and work, gender, housework/division of labor.
Prior research has led to near unanimity among scholars that what married men and women earn in the market affects the amount of housework they do at home. Nevertheless, there is substantial ambiguity and debate about just how earnings affect housework time (Bittman, England, Folbre, Sayer, & Matheson, 2003; Evertsson & Nermo, 2004; Gupta, 2007). Household bargaining theory posits that earnings share should be negatively related to housework time, as the higher earning spouse can be expected to use his or her position of superior earnings to negotiate a smaller housework burden (Lundberg & Pollak, 1996). Though some research bears out this prediction in couples in which the husband earns the majority of couple earnings (Brines, 1994; Greenstein, 2000), scholars have detected a surprising relationship between earnings share and housework in couples in which the wife earns more than half of couple earnings. Women in these couples actually appear to do more housework than otherwise similar women who have earnings that are roughly equal to their husbands', and men in these couples appear to do less housework than otherwise similar men in couples with approximately equal earnings (Brines; Bittman et al; Greenstein). The literature then documents an unexpected curvilinear relationship between earnings share and housework time.
Scholars have interpreted this relationship through the prism of gender performance theory, arguing that housework can serve as a way in which men and women enact gender and create social meaning (Coltrane, 2000; Shelton & John, 1996; West & Zimmerman, 1987). This type of gender performance...