Gender and the Household Division of Labor: Employment and Earnings Variations in Australia

Although substantial effort has been directed at explaining patterns of unpaid household labor, relatively little is known about the effects of household work on employment and their interrelationship in determining paid income. This article applies multivariate analysis to data collected in Australia in 1984 and 1985 to examine the effects of employment on household work. The results show that women in the full-time work force are most affected by household labor, while it has a lesser impact on women in part-time employment; for the latter, household duties would appear to determine their labor market participation. Household labor has more consequences for the weekly earnings of women in full-time work than for those in part-time work, and it also has consequences for the weekly earnings of men. Finally, a decomposition of effects shows that household labor is comparable in importance to occupational characteristics in explaining income differentials between men and women in the full-time work force.