Their Money, Whose Labor? The Effect of a Positive Income Shock on Gender Equality in the Home

Elena Pojman , Penn State University

Scholars have found that while women have entered paid labor en masse in the United States since the 1960s, their male partners still lag behind in terms of performing unpaid domestic labor, and progress has even stalled. Many different-gender couples use outsourcing as a strategy to reduce their domestic burden, and this is most associated with time pressures, financial ability, and gender ideology of the couple. To date no studies have looked at how positive income shocks at the household level might be used to purchase domestic labor outsourcing services. Using the Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend as a natural experiment and data from the 1996-2020 waves of the Consumer Expenditure Survey, I explore how a positive and exogenous income shock shapes the division of labor and intra-household spending of different-gender couples, looking specifically at how the income shock may grant lower- and middle-income households the financial ability to outsource. I discuss implications for gender equality in the home and workforce, as well as potential variation across socioeconomic status.

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 Presented in Session P1. Postercafe