The changing picture of the housework gender gap in contemporary Chinese adults

Prior research has shown that time availability, relative resources, and gender perspective have great effects on couples’ division of housework, yet less attention has been paid to how the magnitude of these influences varies by cohort. By embedding the three dominant micro-level perspectives on housework in a macro-level context (i.e. cohort-level), this study examines each of the three perspectives’ explanatory powers for explaining the housework behaviors of two post-1976 cohorts: the early- and late-reform marriage cohorts. Regression results and Relative Importance analyses examining the three perspectives on housework show dissimilar effects for the two cohorts: the relative resources and gender perspectives better predict the housework gender gap in early-reform couples, while the time availability perspective better predicts the housework gender gap in late-reform couples. Specifically, the three most important predictors of the housework gender gap for the early-reform cohort are wife’s weekly paid work hours, wife’s proportion of couple’s income, and wife or her parents owning the house, while for the younger, late-reform cohort, the three most important predictors are wife’s employment, wife’s weekly paid work hours, and number of co-living children, suggesting that the relative resources perspective is weakened for the late-reform cohort. In addition, both the Relative Importance analyses and the Seemingly Unrelated Regression estimations reveal that although early-reform couples are likely to ‘do gender’ as a performance, this diminishes for late-reform Chinese couples. These changes indicate an uneven process regarding gender equality and the need to take cohort into account when testing the micro-level theoretical perspectives on the housework gap.