The U.S. Economy Would Be Better Off If Men Did More Housework

Women spend too much time on housework relative to men, new research suggests, and it's probably dragging on U.S. productivity.

That's the first finding in this week's economic research wrap, which also looks at changes in the way women have spent their days in recent years and summarizes studies on spillovers from central bank balance-sheet normalization. Check this column each Tuesday for new and topical research from around the world.

Women have less time for on-the-job labor because they spend more time doing housework than their male counterparts — so they miss out when they're working in fields that reward long hours, based on a new National Bureau for Economic Research study. Some women shy away from jobs in fields that require long workweeks, knowing they won't have the time: a 10 percent cut in free time for women reduces their share in high-hour occupations by about 14 percent relative to men, according to the researcher's model.

In total, that difference in time spent on at-home labor results in an 11 percentage point gender wage gap, their analysis estimates. All of this may seem pretty intuitive, but here's the surprise: the pattern hurts society as a whole. If labor were instead allocated in a gender-neutral way, welfare would increase and output per hour would climb by 5.4 percent as people made better use of their time, given their skills.

"Our main message is that developing a theory of time allocation and occupational choice is important for understanding the forces that shape gender differences in labor market outcomes," the researchers from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, University of Toronto and Princeton University write.

Hours, Occupations, and Gender Differences in Labor Market Outcomes
Published July 2017
Available on the NBER website