Perceived fairness of the division of household labor: A comparative study in 29 countries

Abstract

This study investigates the relationship between the division of household labor and individuals’ perceived fairness concerning this division. We applied multilevel multinomial logistic regression to analyze data on both men and women across 29 countries using the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) from 2012 ( N = 16,633). It was found that people who perform a larger share of household tasks are more likely to indicate that they do more than a fair share. Furthermore, we uncovered that in more gender egalitarian countries and in countries where women spend more time in the labor market, women and men are more likely to consider doing a larger share of housework to be unfair. Interestingly, when both country characteristics were included in the same model, we found that for women the effect of country’s female labor force participation lost statistical significance, while for men the country-level gender ideology resulted in a non-significant effect. Implications for future research are discussed.