Economic Dependence, Gender, and the Division of Labor in the Home: A Replication and Extension

TLDR

The gendered division of household labor remains largely female despite women’s employment gains, a pattern Brines (1994) explained through economic dependence and gender‑display models. This study replicates Brines’ model with a new dataset, adds gender‑ideology controls, and examines a distributional measure of housework. The authors re‑apply Brines’ framework, incorporating additional controls and a distributional housework metric to assess economic dependence effects. Housework hours support Brines’ gender‑specific processes, whereas distributional measures show both spouses neutralize nonnormative provider roles, suggesting deviance neutralization rather than gender display.

Abstract

The fundamental question in the study of the gendered division of household labor has come to be why, in the face of dramatic changes in women's employment and earnings, housework remains “women's work.” As a possible answer to this question, Brines (1994) presented a provocative conceptual model of the relationship between economic dependence and the performance of housework by wives and husbands. She concluded that the link between economic dependence and housework follows rules of economic exchange for wives, but among husbands, a gender display model is operative. This paper replicates and extends Brines' model by (a) replicating her work using a different data set; (b) adding additional controls to the model, including a measure of gender ideology; and (c) modeling a distributional (as opposed to absolute) measure of housework. For a measure of hours spent doing housework, the results of my analyses are consistent with Brines' suggestion of separate gender‐specific processes linking economic dependence and amount of housework performed. For a distributional measure of housework, on the other hand, my analyses contradict Brines' findings and suggest that both husbands and wives are acting to neutralize a nonnormative provider role when they do housework. Further analyses suggest that the phenomenon is more likely one of deviance neutralization than of gender display.