Income Inequality and Household Labor

Income inequality has increased dramatically in the United States since the mid 1970s.  This remarkable change in the distribution of household income has spurred a great deal of research on the social and economic consequences of exposure to high inequality.  However, the empirical record on the effects of income inequality is mixed.  Cross-national research often documents negative effects of living in a high inequality regime, but studies that exploit within state and over time variation in inequality within the United States generally find much weaker effects. In this paper, we suggest that previous research has generally overlooked a simple but important pathway through which inequality might manifest in daily life: inequality allows the rich to hire the poor to perform domestic labor.  One important venue where such dynamics might then manifest is in time spent on housework and in particular in the time divide in housework between rich and poor women.

In this paper, we examine the relationship between income inequality and the class divide in women's housework time within the United States.  We do so by merging state level data on income inequality from the IRS and the American Community Survey with time diary data from the 2003-2013 American Time Use Survey (ATUS). Our analysis advances the small body of related empirical work by better accounting for sources of unobserved heterogeneity in the relationship between income inequality, class, and housework, by measuring inequality at the level of the labor market rather than the Nation, and by using high quality time diary data to construct our measures of housework time.  

We find that highly educated and high-income women do less housework than their less advantaged counterparts and we show that this class-gradient in housework time is steeper in more unequal areas.  We also advance this literature by looking directly at the hypothesized mechanism: domestic outsourcing.  To do so, we draw on data from the 2003-2013 Consumer Expenditures Survey (CEX). We show that, as expected based on theory and the time-diary results, rich women are even more likely than poor women to pay for household services in contexts of higher inequality.