%0 Journal Article
%T The changing picture of the housework gender gap in contemporary Chinese adults
%A Ernest Wing Tak Chui
%A Meng Sha Luo
%J Chinese Journal of Sociology
%@ 2057-1518
%D 2019
%R 10.1177/2057150X19848147
%X 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
%K Household task
%K domestic labor
%K unpaid work
%K family work
%K division of labor
%K ¡®doing gender¡¯
%U https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2057150X19848147