Income Inequality and Household Labor
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.