Dynamics of Domestic Labor Across Short‐ and Long‐Distance Family Relocations
| Author | Janeen Baxter,Sergi Vidal,Francisco Perales |
| Date | 01 April 2016 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/jomf.12269 |
| Published date | 01 April 2016 |
S V The University of Queensland
F P J B The University of Queensland∗
Dynamics of Domestic Labor Across
Short- and Long-Distance Family Relocations
Family relocations within developed countries
are argued to have gendered consequences for
paid employment, with men’s careers improving
and women’s careers deteriorating. However,
little is known about their potential relationships
with outcomes in other life domains, including
partnered men’s and women’s relative shares
of domestic labor. The authors addressed this
gap in knowledge by theorizing and examining
how within-couple gender gaps in domestic work
evolve across short- and long-distance family
relocations over the life course, paying attention
to the over-time dynamics before and after event
occurrence. To accomplish this, they used 12
years of panel data from the Household, Income
and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey and
panel regression models. The results indicated
that family relocations widen the within-couple
gender gap in weekly housework hours, largely
because of shifts in women’s employment situa-
tion and fertility episodes that accompany resi-
dential relocations.
Institute for Social Science Research, The University of
Queensland, QLD 4067, Australia (s.vidal@uq.edu.au).
∗ARC Centre of Excellence for Children and Families over
the Life Course and Institute for Social Science Research,
The University of Queensland, and Institute for Social
Science Research, The University of Queensland, QLD
4067, Australia.
This article was edited by Jennifer Glass.
KeyWords:Australia, family relocations, gender,housework,
internal migration, life course.
Domestic divisions of labor are a fundamental
site for gender inequality and have been subject
to considerable attention in the social science lit-
erature. In recent years, this literature has shifted
its focus to the role of family dynamics and
life course transitions. For example, a substan-
tial amount of recent research has been devoted
to examining how the relative shares of paid and
unpaid work undertaken by men and women are
inuenced by entering a cohabiting relationship,
getting married, becoming a parent, and experi-
encing relationship dissolution (Baxter, Hewitt,
& Haynes, 2008; Gupta, 1999; Kluwer, Heesink,
& van de Vliert, 2002). Typical ndings from
these studies are that life course transitions have
transformative effects on the number of hours
that men and women allocate to housework, in
particular among women. However, this grow-
ing body of evidence is still incomplete, as the
inuence of some life course events and tran-
sitions on household divisions of labor remains
underexplored.
We are interested in one event that has
the potential to alter the gender balance in
household arrangements but has not yet been
examined in this context: family relocations.
Long-standing demographic, sociological, and
economic research has unveiled how family
migration within countries is an important
factor promoting and perpetuating gender
inequality at work. Family moves are often
motivated by an opportunity to enhance the
work career of the male partner, with the female
partner following him (Mincer, 1978; Perales &
364 Journal of Marriage and Family 78 (April 2016): 364–382
DOI:10.1111/jomf.12269
Family Relocations and Domestic Labor 365
Vidal, 2013). As a result, after familyrelocations
women experience increased odds of becoming
unemployed or underemployed, wage losses,
and slowed career progression relative both to
nonmovers and their own partners (Boyle, Feng,
& Gayle, 2009; T. J. Cooke, Boyle, Couch, &
Feijten, 2009). Thus, family migration is a factor
that exacerbates overall as well as within-couple
gender inequality (Halfacree, 1995). However,
despite the fact that the literature on family
relocations is generally concerned with gender
divisions of labor, empirical tests have been
restricted to outcomes in the paid work realm,
such as hourly wages, weekly hours of work, and
employment status. To date, it has been silent
on whether family relocations also promote the
emergence of work-related gender inequalities
in the domestic realm, such as time spent on
housework. This is limiting, because there
are important intersections between paid and
unpaid work over the life course that may make
family relocations conducive to renegotiations
of couples’ domestic work arrangements.
The main aim of this study was to recon-
cile the separate literatures on gender inequality
due to family relocations and gendered divi-
sions of household labor and provide rst-time
empirical evidence on the relationships between
these phenomena. There are three reasons why
family relocations may be associated with gen-
der divisions of labor: (a) increases in house-
hold labor resulting from the preparation of a
house move and adaptation to the new loca-
tion, which may be shared inequitably by the
male and female partner (Boyd & Grieco, 2003);
(b) the fact that family relocations exacerbate
within-couple differences in paid work favor-
ing male partners, and these may in turn widen
within-couple differences in unpaid work (Boyle
et al., 2009; T. J. Cooke et al., 2009); and (c)
evidence that changes in family structure are
intimately connected to both residential trajecto-
ries (Feldhaus, Huinink, & Vidal, 2013; Kulu &
Milewski, 2007) and housework divisions (Bax-
ter et al., 2008).
We contribute to the literature on house-
work by expanding our understanding of how
life course events and transitions are associ-
ated with the allocation of domestic work within
the household and to the literature on fam-
ily relocations by examining whether the con-
sequences of such events for gender relations
extend beyond the realm of paid work. More
specically,we tested whether or not the share of
housework done by the male and female spouses
changes when couples undertake family moves,
comparing short- and long-distance relocations.
From a life course perspective, family reloca-
tions are transitions—that is, processes span-
ning before and beyond the occurrence of the
observed event—that can have effects on other
life domains before, during, and after the event
occurrence (Courgeau, 1990). Thus, we also pay
attention to the dynamics in partnered men’s and
women’s share of housework labor before and
after family relocation events. To accomplish
this, we used 12 years of panel data on a repre-
sentative Australian national sample, the House-
hold, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia
(HILDA) Survey (Watson & Wooden, 2012),
and couple-level panel regression models.
B
Domestic Work and Life Course Events
In social science, the notion of “work” is broadly
dened as the expenditure of effort toward the
completion of a task or obtainment of a reward
and typically split into two components: (a)
labor market work and (b) domestic work. Labor
market work relates to work associated with
monetary remuneration that is done in the con-
text of an employer–employee relationship or in
self-employment. Domestic work relates to work
that is unpaid and usually undertaken within
the family home. It may be dened as includ-
ing care of children and other dependents, but
it is often restricted to housework tasks such as
preparing meals, cleaning, cooking, shopping,
laundry, and yard work. In virtually all soci-
eties across national and temporal contexts, men
spend more time than women on paid work,
whereas women spend considerably more time
than men on domestic work (L. Cooke & Bax-
ter, 2010). Although there is some evidence of
declining gender gaps in housework and child
care, the rates and levels of change have been
slow, with women continuing to shoulder the
bulk of this work (Bianchi, Robinson, & Milkie,
2006; Sullivan, 2000). This is surprising, par-
ticularly in Western nations, given women’s
increased involvement in paid work, growing
levels of institutional support for gender equal-
ity, and household changes associated with the
Second Demographic Transition, such as declin-
ing levels of fertility (England, 2010).
Toexplain uneven gender divisions of domes-
tic work, most research has drawn on one of
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