Abstract
Married women often undertake a larger share of housework in many countries and yet they do not always perceive the inequitable division of household labor to be “unfair.” Several theories have been proposed to explain the pervasive perception of fairness that is incongruent with the observed inequity in household tasks. These theories include 1) economic resource theory, 2) time constraint theory, 3) gender value theory, and 4) relative deprivation theory. This paper re-examines these theories with newly available data collected on Japanese married women in 2014 in order to achieve a new understanding of the gendered nature of housework. It finds that social comparison with others is a key mechanism that explains women’s perception of fairness. The finding is compatible with relative deprivation theory. In addition to confirming the validity of the theory of relative deprivation, it further uncovers that a woman’s reference groups tend to be people with similar life circumstances rather than non-specific others. The perceived fairness is also found to contribute to the sense of overall happiness. The significant contribution of this paper is to explicate how this seeming contradiction of inequity in the division of housework and the perception of fairness endures.
Highlights
Wives often do the majority of housework in dual-income households even when they work as much as their husbands in paid work [1]
Using regression methods to analyze a newly available dataset, we found that social comparison is the key mechanism explaining why Japanese wives keep pulling heavier weight in household work than their husbands
Mother’s HHC, wife’s HHC, and others’ HHC are found to be associated with the fairness variable the size and statistical significance of their influence is to be assessed with regression analyses
Summary
Wives often do the majority of housework in dual-income households even when they work as much as their husbands in paid work [1]. The Perception of Fairness Regarding Household Division of Labor all ten countries (Japan, the United States, Belgium, German, France, Hungary, Finland, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and Norway), working wives with young children do more housework than their husbands [8]. Is an illustration: when the wife is not working outside the home, she spends on average 8.5 hours per day on housework, and her husband spends 50 minutes. When the wife is working outside the home for 35 hours or more per week, she spends on average 4.5 hours per day on housework, and her husband spends 55 minutes [8] Even though this persistent labor inequity in Japanese households has been widely observed, there is scant understanding of the mechanism, a gap that this paper is addressing. Using regression methods to analyze a newly available dataset, we found that social comparison is the key mechanism explaining why Japanese wives keep pulling heavier weight in household work than their husbands
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