Abstract
Do all women experience a labor “double burden”? Are women responsible for domestic tasks in all households? What explains variation in patterns of distribution of household labor across families? In this article, I approach these questions from the perspective of two opposing theoretical approaches: the New Home Economics framework, and the Social Capital or sociological framework. I test the validity of these two frameworks with data from the Spanish Fertility and Family Survey of 1995. The results point towards the validity of the sociological perspective: those families in which the husbands have medium labor status present more egalitarian patterns of household labor distribution. Additionally, the results confirm the importance of attitudinal variables such as religiosity to explain domestic labor division patterns: women with more traditional values experience a more severe double burden.
Highlights
¿Experimentan las mujeres una doble carga laboral? ¿Son las mujeres responsables de las tareas domésticas en los hogares? ¿Qué explica la variación en patrones de distribución de trabajo doméstico que tiene lugar a través de las familias? En este artículo se abordan estas cuestiones partiendo de dos marcos teóricos opuestos: el marco de la New Home Economics, y el del Capital Social, que se ponen a prueba a partir de datos de la Encuesta de Fecundidad y Familia de 1995
This “double-burden” for working women has special relevance in countries like Spain, where “the new role of women has had to coexist with the lagging development of institutions, which cannot guarantee that forming a family or having children will not create conflicting interests with their individual career paths.” (González-López 2001:146-147) It is difficult to believe that the unequal division of household labor exists in a homogeneous way across society–that is, that this double burden takes place in the same way across all families
With this aim in mind, in this paper I take into account previous explanatory models on careers of couples, which have focused on explaining labor market participation and attainment of women by considering husband’s labor market resources as a key explanatory variable
Summary
In order to measure employment status, I use the ISEI scale created by Ganzeboom and Treiman (2003).. I use the information in the survey on the occupation of the husband in order to locate him on the different categories of the ISEI scale. For this operation, I rely on the conversion tools in Ganzeboom and Treiman (1993). 23 Once I have a value in the ISEI prestige scale, I create three categories of individuals (this will allow to test for non-linear effects): from 16-35, category 1 (Husb_Status1); from 36-55, category attitudes –that is, dispositional ones-. I will introduce these variables as dummies in the models, leaving Husb_Status as the base category.
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