Care Work and the Gender Division of Labor

When women entered paid employment in large numbers in the second half of the twentieth century, sociologists quickly noticed that they did not simultaneously exit unpaid domestic labor. Instead, employed women took on what Arlie Russell Hochschild, in her landmark 1989 book The Second Shift, called a double burden: roughly full-time paid work plus the bulk of housework and child care. Hochschild and Anne Machung interviewed and observed fifty dual-earner couples over nearly a decade in the San Francisco Bay Area. They calculated that employed mothers worked, on average, the equivalent of an extra month of twenty-four-hour days per year compared to their husbands when paid and unpaid work were totaled.

The imbalance was not random. Couples constructed gender strategies — Hochschild's term for the narratives and practices by which they managed the gap between egalitarian beliefs and unequal practice. One common strategy was the 'family myth': couples publicly described their arrangement as 50-50 while privately the wife did two-thirds or more of domestic work. Another was the 'upstairs/downstairs' division in which the wife did housework 'upstairs' (cooking, cleaning, child care) while the husband took the 'downstairs' (garage, garden, car) — an arrangement presented as equal that in fact assigned to the wife all the time-sensitive, daily, unavoidable work. Hochschild's study showed how gender ideology (traditional, transitional, or egalitarian) and economic leverage interacted to produce a visible gap between what couples said and what they did.

The second-shift finding was neither ephemeral nor local. Large-scale comparative evidence — notably the Multinational Time Use Study (MTUS) coordinated by Jonathan Gershuny — confirmed a persistent gender gap in domestic labor across all industrialized countries. The size of the gap has narrowed since 1965, primarily because women do less housework than they used to (rather than because men do much more), and because household technology and outsourcing have reduced total domestic time. Yet in every country surveyed, employed women still do more unpaid work per day than employed men, with the gap averaging around 1-2 hours per day. The Covid-19 pandemic reopened and widened gender gaps in care as schools and daycares closed, visibly documenting the still-fragile equality of the pre-pandemic settlement.