Intrahousehold Bargaining Power in Spain: An Empirical Test of the Collective Model

This paper analyzes the intrahousehold bargaining power of spouses in Spanish families, in a collective framework. We estimate household labor supply equations and, under certain testable restrictions, we obtain a theoretically derived sharing rule for household income, which characterizes intrahousehold bargaining power. Then, using unique data on decision-making in the household, we construct Pareto weights, and study the validity of the collective model by comparing the theoretical sharing rule and the constructed Pareto weight. The results reveal that both the observed Pareto weight and the theoretical sharing rule display qualitative similarities, thus providing direct empirical support to the collective model. Furthermore, the results suggest that Spanish wives behave more altruistically, while husbands behave more egoistically. This should be taken into account by policy makers and researchers when analyzing inequality in the household, and contemplating specific policies affecting the household.

Gendered household labor & psychological distress: The Middle East vs. North America

Women’s share of household labor (HL) responsibility remains much larger than their male spouses even among dual-earner households. Research has shown how gendered division of HL negatively impacts marital satisfaction. This study measures and compares the division of HL and childcare (CC) among heterosexual married couples and its impact on psychological distress cross-culturally. 284 heterosexual married adults from the Middle East and North America completed an online survey in English or Arabic. Participants completed clinical scales that assess their stress, depression, and anxiety levels. Next, they rated their share of HL responsibility. Data was compared across region and gender, and the analysis examined the impact of gendered division of HL on psychological distress. Results have shown that women in the Middle East had a higher average score for HL and CC than women in North America. Men in North America contributed more in HL and CC than men in the Middle East. Multiple linear regression analysis showed that HL and CC impacts psychological distress. Women complete significantly more HL than men across regions. Among married parents, gendered division of HL is much more prevalent in the Middle East than in North America. Working mothers in the Middle East have the highest correlation between HL and depression. This study highlights the prevalence of gendered division of HL, especially in the Middle East, and it aims to promote a more equitable division of HL for better psychological wellbeing and marital satisfaction.

Communal Coping Manifested in Daily Life: A Focus on Gender

Communal coping consists of a shared appraisal of a stressor and collaborative efforts to manage it. There has been a wealth of literature linking communal coping to relationship and health outcomes, but there is little research on the context in which communal coping occurs or how communal coping is manifested in daily life. The first and second study goals were to examine the implications of gender for the components of communal coping (shared appraisal, collaboration) and for potential manifestations of communal coping in daily life (e.g., shared meals). Our third study goal was to examine whether shared appraisal and collaboration in the context of diabetes generalized to another domain—household chore distribution—and whether these relations were moderated by gender. As an exploratory goal, we examined intersections of gender with race. Participants were 203 couples in which one person had been recently diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. Shared appraisal and collaboration were assessed with multiple methods. Results showed greater shared appraisal and collaboration when patients were male than when they were female. This finding extended to some, but not all, of the daily life behaviors. Actor–partner interdependence models showed that the relations of actor and partner shared appraisal to household labor depended on both role (patient, spouse) and gender; relations of actor and partner collaboration depended only on role. Findings were not moderated by race. These results highlight the need to consider gender in the context of communal coping.

He’s Working from Home and I’m at Home Trying to Work: Experiences of Childcare and the Work–Family Balance Among Mothers During COVID-19

This article captures mothers’ experiences of the work–family balance and division of household labor during the initial COVID-19 lockdown. Interviews were conducted with twenty-five academics and twenty professionals in other fields. Mothers who split childcare with their partners had a more positive experience of the work–family balance during lockdown, compared with mothers who did the majority of the childcare. The present study adds a new wrinkle into the literature on flexibility and work–family balance: the perception of flexibility and its impact on the division of labor. Academic mothers, who had always had highly “flexible” jobs, were less likely to split childcare with their partners pre-pandemic and thus less likely to have positive experiences of work–family balance during the Spring 2020 lockdown. I argue that perceived flexibility of a partner’s job affected allocation of childcare during the initial stages of the pandemic, a moment that wreaked significant harm on women’s careers.

The Gender Gap in Household Tasks and Division of Labor Satisfaction During COVID-19

For many years, scholars have directed our attention to the gender gap in domestic labor. Even when women engage in paid employment, they nevertheless perform the majority of the household labor in most wealthy countries. At the same time, disasters and crises both expose and exacerbate existing social inequalities. In this paper, we ask: in what ways has the COVID-19 pandemic contributed to the gender gap in household labor, including childcare? And how do men and women feel about this gap? Using data from the Canadian Perspectives survey series (Wave 3), conducted by Statistics Canada three months into the pandemic, our analyses consider the task distribution that made household labor intensely unequal during COVID-19, with women ten times more likely than men to say childcare fell mostly on them, for example. Yet, in nearly all of our models, women did not unambiguously report being more dissatisfied with the division of domestic tasks within the house, nor were they more likely than men to say that the household division of labor “got worse” during COVID, however, parents (mothers and fathers) did feel that it got worse. We discuss what these findings mean for women’s mental health, long-term paid labor, and interpersonal power, and raise questions about why it is we are not seeing a decrease in women’s reported satisfaction with this division of labor. These findings spotlight gender inequality as pillars of capitalism, and how the structural and the interpersonal weathering of the pandemic comes at women’s expense.