Cohabitation and domestic labour
Date
1998
Authors
Roelants van Baronaigien, Dominique
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Abstract
The division of domestic labour is something that affects most people in our society. Much research has been done on the issue of why women do far more domestic labour than men, even after controlling for the number of hours spent in paid labour. That work has predominantly focused on married couples although there is some work done on the division of domestic labour for cohabiting couples.
What has not been done before, and what will be presented in this thesis is in analysis of the division of domestic labour of three separate groups, couples that are currently cohabiting, couples that cohabited before their marriage, and couples that did not cohabit before their marriage. Given the theories from the literature on divorce, one would expect that cohabiters would have the most egalitarian division of domestic labour and married people that did not cohabit prior to marriage would have the least egalitarian division of domestic labour.
Significant statistical differences are found amongst the males in these three groups and the differences are in the expected direction. Differences were also found for the share of domestic labour performed by women, again in the expected direction, but these differences were not significant.