Shared housework in Norway and Sweden: advancing the gender revolution

Abstract

In the first part of the gender revolution, women have entered the public spheres of education, employment and politics. The next step is the process by which men enter the private sphere and share the responsibility for the care of home and children equally with their female partners. Using comparable survey data, we investigate to what extent this process is underway in Norway and Sweden, analysing both ideal and actual sharing. Young Swedish couples are clearly more in favour of egalitarian sharing of housework than their Norwegian counterparts, and also seem to apply this ideal in reality to a greater extent. This is probably due to Sweden's longer history of gender equality norms, which are more `institutionalized' in public policies (thus demonstrating path dependency). However, more or less the same explanatory factors were established to be important as those found by researchers of other, less gender-equal, societies.