From unfulfilled wants to the experience of injustice: Women's sense of injustice regarding the lopsided division of household labor

The present research deals with factors that contribute to women's sense of injustice regarding the lopsided division of household labor. The proposed model of perceived injustice combines elements of the distributive justice framework of Major (1993) and Thompson (1991), the two-factor model of relative deprivation (Crosby, 1982), and the attribution-of-blame model of judgments of injustice (Mikula, 1993). The results of a study with 132 employed women are consistent with the proposed model and show that unfulfilled wants, perceived violations of entitlement, and attributions of blame directly affect women's perceptions of being unjustly treated by their partners. Beyond that, women's judgments of injustice were indirectly affected by the outcomes of various comparison processes through their impact on perceived violations of entitlement. Finally, attributions of responsibility and perceived lack of justifications contributed indirectly to the experience of injustice through their impact on the amount of blame attributed to the partner. The findings provide evidence for the usefulness of the theories considered in this study to understand and predict women's sense of injustice, and their integration into a single model of perceived injustice. © 1998 Plenum Publishing Corporation.