Men's Housework, Women's Housework, and Second Births in Australia

Abstract

Is gender inequality in unpaid work within households implicated in falling fertility rates? This paper investigates whether the likelihood couples with one child will have more children is affected by: (i) the amount of household labor they each perform or (ii) the way they divide household labor between themselves. Drawing a sample of partnered couples with one child (n = 573) from the longitudinal Household, Income and Labor Dynamics in Australia survey, we conduct multivariate regression analysis and find the more housework that Australian women do, the less likely they are to have more children. Neither fathers' time allocation to housework, nor relative shares of housework, were found to have an effect on subsequent fertility. Thus, mothers' own domestic workloads negatively impacted upon fertility, but shares of housework did not.