New research from Wharton’s Corinne Low links unequal domestic workloads to stalled progress on closing the wage gap — and even declining marriage rates.
Two decades of stalled progress on closing the U.S. gender pay gap may have less to do with the office and more to do with the kitchen sink.
A recent study from Corinne Low, a Wharton professor of business economics and public policy, shows that in heterosexual couples, men don’t take on more housework when women earn more — an imbalance that can reduce the time women have for paid work.
Today, men average roughly 8 hours of housework a week, while women do about 20. Surprisingly, the amount men do changes little with their wives’ earnings. In dual-earning couples, men do about the same housework when they earn 20% of the household income as they do when they earn 80%. Nor has there been a big shift in men’s chore-doing over time: They do about the same amount of housework today as they did in the 1980s.
As women’s earning power has grown over time, this leaves many “winning the bread and baking it too,” which is also the title of Low’s study. Low described how this squeeze, especially when children are young, can push women to reduce their hours or step away from demanding career paths, such as law, finance, or senior management. The paper finds that even when a woman’s wage is more than twice her partner’s, she still works fewer hours than he does.
Low called this “a smoking gun” for why progress on closing the gender wage gap has stalled. A recent data analysis from the U.S. Census Bureau showed the ratio of women’s pay relative to men’s has declined for the second year in a row.
“The imbalance in chores reverberates beyond the household because it affects how much time women have to work,” added Low, also the author of Having It All, a new book exploring the trade-offs women face and how economics can help resolve them.
Why Are Women Still Doing More Chores?
Her study rules out some practical limits as the cause of the imbalance in chores. The imbalance holds, for example, when both partners have a college education and above-average income to pay for help. It also appears in couples without kids and in those whose children are above five, suggesting that factors like maternity leave or breastfeeding are not the main explanation.
Low said the data instead points to “gender norms” — meaning women still do more housework because of ingrained social expectations, even when it does not make practical or financial sense for the household.
Some researchers use the “comparative advantage” theory to explain this — the idea that if one partner has become more efficient at housework, often through experience, they may end up doing more of it.
Low’s model suggests this may explain some of the housework gap, but not why women continue to do more even when their wage advantage is too high to justify it on efficiency grounds. Even when men have zero earnings, such as during unemployment, most of their extra time goes to leisure rather than chores.
Low said a standard economic model would assume that couples living together share tasks and assign them to the partner who can do them at the lowest “cost,” reducing the total time and money spent on chores.
Instead, she found that the total value of time spent on housework — calculated using each partner’s hourly wage — falls after divorce, indicating the split was inefficiently tilted toward women during marriage. Indeed, men’s time doing housework goes up upon divorce and women’s time goes down. Low said she found that surprising: “You’re going from having two adults in the household to one, and women are more likely to be the custodial parents as well. So the fact that her time falls means that he wasn’t really sharing that work — he was potentially creating more of it.”
Low’s model suggests that men are less opposed to taking on housework when single or living with another man. Same-sex couples behave differently, with the lower earner taking on more housework.
Is the Housework Gap Driving Low Marriage and Fertility Rates?
Several earlier studies had shown that marriage rates tended to be lower when women’s earning power was higher than men’s. Low and her co-authors wanted to show that this might be linked to men’s reluctance to take on housework. “If a couple cannot ‘reverse specialize’ — if he won’t do the home production when she’s the higher earner — it actually limits the overall benefits, what we call economic surplus, to marriage,” Low said.
To explore this further, the study looks at women who are U.S. immigrants from countries where men do little housework — OECD data show big gaps in places like Pakistan — and compares them to those from countries with a more equal sharing, such as the Nordic nations.
It then shows that female immigrants from the countries where housework is divided less equally are more likely to stay single or marry outside their ethnic group when they live in cities where they’re likely to out-earn men. The effect of men being low-earning is much more muted for women from countries where housework is divided more equally.
“We control for the effect of stigma against women out-earning men, which we can measure, and we find that’s not the driver,” Low said. “It’s the practical matter that she’s earning more, but she’s going to be expected to do the housework, too, and so the marriage is less efficient.”
Low said fixes could include teaching boys domestic skills early so that sharing housework feels normal in adulthood, and challenging outdated ideas that chores are “women’s work.”
She also pointed to broader changes that could make it easier for men to take on more domestic work. Low suggested examples such as paid paternity leave, work hours being better structured to accommodate home responsibilities, and subsidized childcare — measures she sees as part of a bigger cultural shift.
“We need a second gender revolution,” she said. “The first was women entering the workforce and taking on these roles; the second is men stepping up at home and sharing chores equally.”
Corinne Low
Associate Professor of Business Economics and Public Policy
