Lecture by Lynn Prince Cook. A critical but rarely explored barrier to achieving the "revolution" of egalitarian divisions of unpaid household work may be the wage penalty for domestic tasks predicted by feminist and economic theory. By pooling 2010-12 American Time Use Survey data and using unconditional quantile regression, we reveal that effects vary with the type of domestic task and across husbands' and wives' hourly wage distributions. Each additional hour of routine housework that wives perform on employment days predicts a significant four to five percent wage penalty at all wage levels. Yet we also found threshold effects, in that wives' routine housework penalty becomes significant only after exceeding 1.5 hours per employment day. Threshold effects do not substantially alter low-wage wives' predicted dollar penalty, but indicate high-wage wives incur no wage penalty whatsoever. At the same time, only the highest-wage husbands incur a significant wage penalty for each additional hour of routine housework. Greater time in childcare on employment days has no significant impact on either parent's wages. We conclude potential for greater domestic equality varies with the type of task and a-cross the wage distribution. Relative housework equality has peaked for the highest-wage individuals, but there are no significant wage penalties for low- and moderate-wage husbands' greater housework time, or all fathers' greater time in daily childcare.
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