Gender, Productivity, and the Marital Wage Premium

Explanations for married men's wage premium often emphasize greater market productivity due to a gendered division of household labor, though this "specialization thesis" has been insufficiently interrogated. Using data from Wave 2 of the National Survey of Families and Households (N = 972), this paper examines the relationship between wages and time spent in paid labor and housework for married women and men with high levels of labor force attachment and their spouses. Scrutiny of couples' time use finds strong evidence for the gendered division of labor, but little support for the anticipated wage effects of the specialization thesis itself. Less strict sample restrictions point to the need for continued research directed at couples' joint employment and household labor decisions. Key Words: family economics, gender, housework/division of labor, income, marriage. National Survey of Families and Households. A substantial body of research has shown that marriage is strongly correlated with higher earnings for men (for reviews, see Korenman & Neumark, 1991; Loh, 1996). The robust predictive power of marriage found for men's wages has led to an almost ubiquitous inclusion of a control for marriage in wage equations for men. Research into the phenomenon has found that the hourly wages of married men are generally 10% to 40% more than those earned by never-married men. Moreover, this finding has remained relatively consistent for decades, despite controls for a myriad of theoretically relevant human capital and job characteristics (Cohen, 2002; Chun & Lee, 2001; Gray & Vanderhart, 2000), even among men employed within the same occupation (Hotchkiss & Moore, 1999) and same-gender identical twins (Antonovics & Town, 2004). One intriguing explanation on offer is that marriage permits men to be more productive in paid labor by allowing them to focus on market production while their wives specialize in home production (the "specialization hypothesis"). Typically, the requisite information on spousal time constraints has not been available to researchers. Moreover, the generalizability of the phenomenon to women has gone largely untested until recently. This paper advances our understanding of the relationship between gender, productivity, and wages by examining the evidence for the specialization thesis for both married women and men. The specialization explanation for the marriage wage premium emphasizes the well-known neoclassical economic arguments of Becker (1981) and others that a gendered division of household labor benefits male productivity at paid labor, though the precise beneficial mechanism remains unclear. In this literature, productivity is typically inferred from men's wages; uncommonly, Bellas (1992) found that male faculty with homemaking spouses not only had higher salaries than men whose wives were employed but also published significantly more scholarly articles and books. Although nearly all research uses the presence of children as a proxy for household responsibilities, many studies historically have operated in a social "vacuum" and have inferred specialization from marriage. More recently, some researchers have begun including measures of wives' time allocations. For example, Jacobsen and Rayack (1996) found evidence that wives' hours spent in paid labor had a negative effect on a husband's annual salary, though the authors ultimately concluded that marital matching pairs men who have positive labor-market characteristics with women who have lower levels of labor force attachment. Conversely, both Loh (1996) and Gray (1997) found no relationship between wives' labor market decisions and their husband's marriage wage premium. More recently, a few studies have directly examined the relationship between wives' household labor and men's wages (e.g. Hersch & Stratton, 1997), but less is known about men's time constraints outside paid employment. Nevertheless, that men perform similar amounts of housework regardless of marital status (Hersch & Stratton, 2000; South & Spitze, 1994; for opposing arguments see Fuwa, 2005; Gupta, 1999) implies that men's household labor is unrelated to the male marriage premium. …