Do women face a glass ceiling at home? The division of household labor among dual-earner couples

In this paper, we use data on mixed-gender dual-earner couples in Southern and Western Europe to investigate how the division of unpaid household labor within mixed-gender couples varies depending on the ratio of the partners’ market wages. From analysis of the EU Statistics on Income and Living Conditions, we first show that married or cohabiting women do twice as much household work as single women with the same income. Furthermore, women’s time spent in home production does not vary in relation to the couple’s relative wages in Southern Europe. We find a positive elasticity of substitution between male and female labor in home production with respect to their relative within-couple wages in Western Europe. Our identification is based on predicting each country’s wage distributions within gender-specific cells defined by age group and education using distributions in all the other countries. We present a positive evidence for presence of a “second-shift” that women face especially in Southern Europe, which may stem from regional gender norms.