Cross-national reports of housework: An investigation of the gender empowerment measure
Introduction
The persistence of unequal divisions of housework between spouses has intrigued scholars for decades. At the individual-level, theoretical explanations of spouses’ unequal housework have centered on spouses’ resources (Becker, 1991, Brines, 1994, Lennon and Rosenfield, 1994) and on gender role expectations (Becker, 1991, Berk, 1985, West and Zimmerman, 1987). Recent scholarship has emphasized cross-national comparisons of spouses’ unequal housework divisions (Batalova and Cohen, 2002, Baxter, 1997, Bittman et al., 2003, Cooke, 2006, Fuwa, 2004, Fuwa and Cohen, 2007, Hook, 2006, Geist, 2005). From this body of comparative research, many macro-level characteristics have been shown to be significantly associated with housework, including the gross domestic product (Knudsen and Wærness, 2008, Fuwa, 2004), rates of female labor force participation (Batalova and Cohen, 2002), the skill specificity required for employment (Iversen and Rosenbluth, 2006), the divorce culture (Yodanis, 2005), and the welfare state (Geist, 2005, Fuwa, 2004). Throughout much of this cross-national multi-level research, one macro–micro relationship consistently emerges: couples living in countries with stronger gender empowerment, measured through the United Nations Development Report’s gender empowerment measure (GEM), have more equal divisions of housework (Batalova and Cohen, 2002, Hank and Jürges, 2007, Knudsen and Wærness, 2008, Fuwa, 2004).
The significant relationship between country-level gender empowerment and couples’ divisions of household labor is an important contribution to the housework literature and to understanding gender equality more generally, but the GEM has been used relatively uncritically. The GEM is a composite measure of four indicators: women’s representation in parliament; the percent of women as legislators, senior officials and managers; the proportions of women employed as professionals; and the female–male wage ratio. As a composite index, this measure has been shown to be significantly correlated with couples’ divisions of household labor (Batalova and Cohen, 2002, Hank and Jürges, 2007, Knudsen and Wærness, 2008, Fuwa, 2004), but certain components of the GEM may be more important predictors of spouses’ housework hours and proportions than others. For example, female parliamentarians are more likely to pass legislation, including paternal leave, that encourages male participation in the home (Swers, 1998). In addition, women in countries with lower female–male wage gaps may use their resources to encourage a more equal division of housework. In this respect, understanding the separate components of the GEM is important to understanding individual divisions of housework.
Disentangling the separate country-level effects can have important theoretical and policy implications – not all forms of gender empowerment may be equal. Referring to the GEM index, Fuwa (2004) argues, “Research that differentiates these specific aspects of macro-level gender inequality will improve our understanding of contextual effects in relation to public policies.” Most previous comparative housework research on the GEM index has utilized one dataset (the International Social Survey Programme) and has focused exclusively on the relationship between GEM and couples’ divisions of housework tasks (Batalova and Cohen, 2002, Fuwa, 2004) at the expense of each spouses’ hours (see Knudsen and Wærness, 2008 for an exception). In this respect, the significant relationships between GEM and housework hours may hinge on both the data and the dependent variable. To address these limitations, this study applies a new dataset, the 2004 European Social Survey (ESS), and expands the analyses to include the respondents’ housework hours and housework proportions. For this study, the housework proportion measure is a ratio of the total weekly housework the respondent performs to the total weekly household housework. Specifically, this research asks: how does the effect of the GEM compare to the effects of the separate GEM measures on respondent’s housework hours and housework proportions?
To address this question, I pair the 2004 United Nations Development Report’s GEM scores with individual-level data from the 2004 European Social Survey for respondents in 25 countries. To address simultaneously individual-and country-level effects, I analyse the data using hierarchical linear modeling (HLM). Since the division of household labor is a highly gendered process, I run the models separately for men and women to compare the relationship between the aggregated and disaggregated GEM scores and the respondents’ housework hours and proportions. I then test for significant cross-level interactions for three strategically selected individual-level measures. The results demonstrate complex relationships between the level-1 and level-2 variables for men and women.
Section snippets
GEM: previous findings, methodological evaluations, and critiques
The purpose of this study is to systematically evaluate the relationship between the individual GEM measures and couples’ divisions of housework, and to test for theoretically driven cross-level interactions. The GEM is constructed to measure women’s agency within a country (Bardhan and Klasen, 1999). Using the 1994 International Social Survey Programme (ISSP), Batalova and Cohen (2002) and Fuwa (2004) both document a significant positive relationship between a country’s GEM score and couples’
Individual-level theoretical approaches to housework
Individual-level measures are controls that have been supported in most of the previous housework research. For this reason, the individual-level housework theories are outlined briefly below. Rooted in human capital theory, the resource perspective emphasizes the economic exchange of housework and market work between spouses. According to human capital theory, spouses allocate their time and resources to the labor force or household to maximize efficiency (Becker, 1991). Indeed, increases in
Data
This study pairs individual-level data from the 2004 European Social Survey with the 2004 United Nations Human Development Report’s gender empowerment measure for 25 nations: Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine, and United Kingdom. The European Social Survey (ESS) is a cross-national collaboration of
Respondents’ housework hours and proportions
This study employs two dependent variables – one measuring the respondent’s time spent in housework and the other measuring the respondent’s proportions of the housework. Housework hours measure the amount of time the respondent spends performing housework each week. Respondents were asked for the total weekly and weekend household housework hours in separate questions and then for their share of the housework hours on a six-point scale: (1) None or almost none; (2) Up to a quarter of the time;
Analytical strategy
I use hierarchical linear modeling (Raudenbush and Bryk, 2002) to simultaneously model level-one and level-two effects.
The equation at the individual-level is:Where Yij equals the reported housework hours for respondent i in country j and β0j is the country-level intercept. Xixj reflects the respondent’s individual-level attributes, and βkj measures the effects of these attributes; rij is the level-1 error term, which is assumed to be normally distributed with a mean of zero.
Results
Table 1 provides a descriptive overview of the dependent and macro-level measures. Women report the highest mean housework hours in Slovakia and the lowest in France, but women in Greece report the highest housework proportions and women in Denmark, Sweden and the Ukraine the lowest. Men report the highest housework hours in Slovakia, and the lowest in Turkey, but men in Sweden report the highest housework proportions and men in Turkey the lowest. In terms of the macro-level measures, Turkey is
Discussion
This paper sought to explain respondents’ housework hours and proportions in 25 countries. Building on previous research that has found a country’s GEM score to be associated with more equal divisions of housework between spouses (Batalova and Cohen, 2002, Knudsen and Wærness, 2008, Fuwa, 2004), this study included both the GEM index and the disaggregated GEM indicators to test for significant associations with respondents’ housework. The results demonstrate that the GEM as a composite index
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