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The "Feminist Mystique" Under Market Hegemony: Media's Framing of Women's Work-and-Family Issues in Contemporary China

Changes in Mothers' Perceptions of Neighborhood Quality, Child Well-Being, and Parenting Stress, 1976-2002

The Deserving Poor and the U.S. Welfare System

Mompreneurs or Just Women in Business? The Impacts of Public Policy, Cultural Norms, and Family Structure on Women's Entrepreneurship in 15 Countries

Continuity and Change in Verbal Conflict and Intimate Partner Violence During the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Prospective Analysis of Adults

The COVID-19 Pandemic and Infant Health: A Population-Level Analysis

Elderly Coresidence and Son Preference: Can Pension Reforms Solve the ‘Missing Women’ Problem?

A Helping Hand Goes a Long Way: Long-Term Effects of Counseling and Support to Workfare Program Participants

The quantitative scholarship on domestic labor has documented the existence of a gender gap in its performance in all countries for which data are available. Only recently have researchers begun to analyze economic disparities  among  women in their time spent doing housework, and their studies have been largely limited to the U.S. We extend this line of inquiry using data from two European countries, the former West Germany and Sweden. We estimate the “economic gap” in women’s housework time, which we define as the difference between the time spent by women at the lowest and highest deciles of their own earnings. We expect this gap to be smaller in Sweden given its celebrated success at reducing both gender and income inequality. Though Swedish women do spend less time on domestic labor, however, and though there is indeed less earnings inequality among them, the economic gap in their housework is only a little smaller than among women in the former West Germany. In both places, a significant negative association between women’s individual earnings and their housework time translates into economic gaps of more than 2.5 hours per week. Moreover, in both countries, women at the highest earnings decile experience a gender gap in housework that is smaller by about 4 hours per week compared to their counterparts at the lowest decile.