Do immigrant women spend more time on unpaid labor? Generational differences by race, ethnicity, and household composition in household work within the United States

Abstract

ABSTRACT Despite relative progress, it is an overt fact that women still take on the heavier burden of unpaid work in the household compared to men in the United States. Our study expands the horizons of previous studies by looking at women specifically and analyzes how women’s performance of unpaid labor differentiates based on various contexts such as generational status, household composition, race, and ethnicity. Using the pooled cross-sectional data from the 2011-2021 American Time Use Survey (ATUS), we test hypotheses derived from an absolute resources perspective and a structural perspective to examine migrant generational differences among married, cohabiting, and single women as well as investigate the intra-group differences of racial and ethnic groups. From our descriptive analysis and ordinary least squares (OLS) regression analyses, we find support for the structural perspective for housework, as the generational differences remain even after controlling for socioeconomic factors, but only for first-generation married women. However, socioeconomic factors account for the differences between cohabiting or single first-generation women, which is supported by the absolute resources perspective. Our intra-group analysis by racial and ethnic groups yielded similar findings but found that Hispanic and Asian first-generation women take on a larger proportion of housework, relative to later-generation women.