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Housework as a Woman's Job? What Looks Like Gender Ideologies Could Also Be Stereotypes

By on September 3, 2024 in Articles

Katrin Auspurg, Sabine Düval

Sociological Science September 3, 2024
10.15195/v11.a29

Abstract

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We question the validity of standard measures of gender ideology. When asked about “men” and “women” in general, respondents may imagine women (men) with lower (higher) labor market resources. Therefore, standard measures may conflate gender ideologies (injunctive norms) with stereotypical beliefs (descriptive norms). We test this hypothesis with an experiment in the German family panel pairfam: ∼1,200 respondents rated the appropriate division of housework in ∼3,700 hypothetical couples. By gradually adding information about labor market resources, we were able to override respondents’ stereotypical beliefs. We find that with more information, even “traditional” respondents support egalitarian housework arrangements. The main difference between “traditional” and “egalitarian” respondents is not in their ideologies (as previously thought), but in their interpretation of vague items. This leads us to conclude that standard measures overestimate traditional gender ideologies. Our study also illustrates how varying the amount of information can help identify respondents’ implicit beliefs.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Katrin Auspurg: Department of Sociology, LMU Munich
E-mail: katrin.auspurg@lmu.de

Sabine Düval: German Youth Institute (DJI)
E-mail: dueval@dji.de

Acknowledgements: We thank the participants of the Conference of the European Survey Research Association (ESRA) in 2019, the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association (ASA) in 2019, the pairfam User Conference in 2019, and the seminar on “Analytical Sociology: Theory and Empirical Applications” at at the Venice International University in 2018 for helpful suggestions. We are also grateful for comments on an earlier version we received from Josef Brüderl. We used data from the German Family Panel pairfam, coordinated by Josef Brüderl, Sonja Drobniè, Karsten Hank, Johannes Huinink, Bernhard Nauck, Franz J. Neyer, and Sabine Walper. From 2004 to 2022, pairfam was funded as priority program and long-term project by the German Research Foundation (DFG). Sabine Düval worked on the manuscript and data analysis mainly during her PhD studies at the LMU Munich. Part of this work was done while Katrin Auspurg was a Visiting Fellow at the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence.

Supplemental Materials

Reproducibility Package: The data we used (pairfam data release 10.0) can be accessed here: https://www.pairfam.de/en/data/data-access. Our replication files (Stata dofiles and data on response times not included in the pairfam release) are available on the following OSF platform: https://osf.io/3fqw9 (Auspurg and Düval 2024).

  • Citation: Auspurg, Katrin, and Sabine Düval. 2024. “Housework as a Woman’s Job?: What Looks Like Gender Ideologies Could Also Be Stereotypes.” Sociological Science 11: 789-814.
  • Received: September 21, 2023
  • Accepted: February 22, 2024
  • Editors: Arnout van de Rijt, Maria Abascal
  • DOI: 10.15195/v11.a29


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Gender Convergence in Housework Time: A Life Course and Cohort Perspective

By on May 31, 2018 in Articles

Thomas Leopold, Jan Skopek, Florian Schulz

Sociological Science, May 31, 2018
10.15195/v5.a13

Abstract
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Knowledge about gender convergence in housework time is confined to changes studied across repeated cross-sections of data. This study adds a dynamic view that links broader social shifts in men’s and women’s housework time to individual life-course profiles. Using panel data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (1985–2015), our analysis is the first to trace changes in housework time across the entire adult life course (ages 20–90) and across a large range of cohorts (1920–1990). The results revealed two types of gender convergence in housework time. First, the gender gap converged across the life course, narrowing by more than 50 percent from age 35 until age 70. Life-course profiles of housework time were strongly gendered, as women’s housework time peaked in younger adulthood and declined thereafter, whereas men’s housework time remained stably low for decades and increased only in older age. Second, the gender gap converged across cohorts, narrowing by 40 percent from cohorts 1940 until 1960. Cohort profiles of housework time showed strong declines in women and moderate increases in men. Both cohort trends were linear and extended to the most recently born, supporting the notion of continued convergence in housework time.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Thomas Leopold: Department of Sociology, University of Amsterdam, and State Institute for Family Research at the University of Bamberg
E-mail: t.leopold@uva.nl

Jan Skopek: Department of Sociology, Trinity College Dublin
E-mail: skopekj@tcd.ie

Florian Schulz: State Institute for Family Research at the University of Bamberg, and Department of Sociology, University of Bamberg
E-mail: florian.schulz@ifb.uni-bamberg.de

Acknowledgements: This study was supported by the German Research Foundation (grant number SCHU 3081/1-1). Replication files to this article are available at the authors’ websites: http://www.thomasleopold.eu, http://www.skopek.org, and http://www.floschulz.de.


  • Citation: Leopold, Thomas, Jan Skopek, and Florian Schulz. 2018. “Gender Convergence in Housework Time: A Life Course and Cohort Perspective.” Sociological Science 5: 281-303.
  • Received: March 29, 2018
  • Accepted: April 19, 2018
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Sarah Soule
  • DOI: 10.15195/v5.a13

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