Market Earnings and Household Work: New Tests of Gender Performance Theory

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 may be particularly important in the context of gender deviance, such as when couples do not adhere to the malebreadwinner norm, with housework being used to neutralize deviance and reconstruct gender (Bittman et al., 2003; Greenstein, 2000). Though a number of findings in the housework literature seem to provide support for gender performance theory, the broader empirical record is substantially more ambiguous. One set of findings suggests that men may in fact "do gender" by reducing housework time when they earn less than their wives (Brines, 1994; Greenstein, 2000). But this evidence in support of gender performance theory has been challenged by scholars who found that these results are driven primarily by outliers - the lowest earning men in married couples (Bittman et al., 2003; Gupta, 1999b). Other research provides some evidence that, although men may not be doing gender, women may be engaging in gender performance through housework (Bittman et al.; Evertsson & Nermo, 2004). This finding has also been challenged, in this case by recent work that draws on autonomy theory to suggest that women's absolute levels of earnings, not their share of earnings, may predict the amount of time they spend on housework (Achen & Gough, 2009; Gupta, 2006, 2007). This uncertainty in the literature has created a substantial gap in our understanding of housework. In this paper I provide new evidence to help resolve the empirical debate. Drawing on time diary data collected between 2003 and 2007 by the American Time Use Survey (ATUS), I assessed the relationship between men's and women's housework time and their earnings. …