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Posted: 2018-02-25 03:58:31

It’s a weekend ritual in countless households: working parents come together and figure out what needs to be done, and who will do it.

But if your weekly housework haggle is proving difficult it might be time to consult an economist. Yes, you heard me right, an economist.

The economics profession has long had an interest in understanding who does the domestic chores and why. And economic researchers have made some interesting discoveries.

One theory is that couples negotiate – or bargain - over household labour based on how much money they earn. The logic underpinning housework bargaining is that if one partner is contributing more money to the partnership they are justified in contributing less in other areas, especially housework.

Since unpaid housework is considered menial and often unpleasant, those with the highest income and therefore the most economic power - usually men - bargain their way out of it. That leaves the partner with less economic power - usually women – to do most of the unpaid chores.

But things change when the economic balance of power in the household shifts. A 2013 study by academics Janeen Baxter and Belinda Hewitt found that when Australian women started to earn more money relative to their male partners the amount of housework they did went down. Women who contributed an additional 1 per cent of relative weekly earnings, on average, did about 17 minutes less housework a week.

A study by Gigi Foster, an economist at the University of NSW, and Leslie Stratton from America’s Virginia Commonwealth University, has now shed more light on how Australian couples negotiate over housework, especially when the balance of economic power shifts.

Using data from the long-running Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey, they investigated how the distribution of housework within families is affected by job promotions and terminations.

“A promotion signals you have more opportunities in the labour market that might change your bargaining power within the household, and you might use that increased power to get out of more housework,” Foster says.

Sure enough, Foster and Stratton found that when a female in a mixed gender couple gets a promotion she tends to do a bit less housework, and her partner a bit more.

So one way to get out of housework – if you’re a woman at least - is to get a promotion at work.

While it’s heartening that the balance of housework changes in many households when a female partner is promoted, it’s worth remembering Australian women still do far more housework than men. The latest HILDA survey found that even in households were women are the main breadwinner they do almost 4 hours a week more housework, on average, than their male partner.

The research by Foster and Stratton also underscores how the division of labour in Australian households is strongly influenced by levels of education.

In less-educated households, which tend to have more conservative views on gender roles, men tended not to do more housework when their female partner got a promotion. Less-educated men were also the most likely to cut the amount of time they spend on housework when they get a promotion.

And when a man gets sacked? In less educated households a man was likely to do less housework, not more, after losing his job and his partner was likely to increase the time she spent on housework.

This might seem counterintuitive but Foster suspects these women are compensating for their man’s loss of self esteem and trying to shore up traditional gender roles in the household.

“When the 'male breadwinner' in a less-educated household falters, his wife may compensate for this perceived violation of gender norms by doing more housework,” she said.

Foster is fascinated with housework personally, as well as professionally, and believes economists have a lot to offer families when it comes to thinking about housework.

She’s got a tip for doing the chores she reckons every household can benefit from: it makes sense to specialise.

“If you split all the chores 50/50 - so everyone does half the laundry, or half the cleaning, or half the dishes and everything else – its inefficient from an economic standpoint because you are not exploiting the returns to comparative advantage that are otherwise available in almost all productive situations,” she told me.

Economists normally use that term “comparative advantage” when talking about trade – a country has a comparative advantage in producing a particular item if it can do so at lower opportunity cost than other countries. But Foster reckons the same idea can be applied in households by allocating tasks according to what people are comparatively good at.

In Foster’s own household, for example, she does all the cleaning and her partner does all the laundry.

“What you want from an economic standpoint is for the two spouses to fully specialise in whatever area of household production they have a comparative advantage in,” she said.

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