Abstract
Among European countries, Italian couples show one of the widest gender gaps in housework division: Italian women still carry out three-quarters of family labour. Following the existing literature, this article focuses on three theoretical explanations of the persistence of the gendered division of unpaid work: time availability, relative resources, and conformity to traditional gender ideology. Time-Use data from the 2008/2009 Survey edition has been used to study the behaviour of Italian couples, married or living together, where the women are employed. The amount of time spent by men and women in domestic tasks has been modelled as function of several family characteristics and a Tobit model has been used in order to take into account the truncated nature of the dependent variables. Results show that the amount of time dedicated by women to housework significantly decreases when they take on the role of breadwinner, whereas the involvement in domestic tasks of male partners increases when they are unemployed. Therefore, in conformity with the expectations of relative resources’ hypothesis, Italian data shows a positive impact of the female financial capacity in reducing gender segregation in housework.
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