Enough Time for Housework? Low‐Wage Work and Desired Housework Time Adjustments
| Author | Susan J. Lambert,Julia R. Henly,Alexandra B. Stanczyk |
| Date | 01 February 2017 |
| Published date | 01 February 2017 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/jomf.12344 |
A B. S University of Chicago
J R. H S J. L University of Chicago∗
Enough Time for Housework? Low-Wage Work
and Desired Housework Time Adjustments
Although studies examine preferences for hours
spent in paid employment, little attention has
been given to preferences for hours spent in
unpaid household labor. This study examines
the extent to which women working in low-paid
retail jobs would prefer to spend more or less
time on household work and how alignment
between preferred and actual time on house-
work is related to characteristics of paid work.
Using original survey data and company records
on a sample of women working at a U.S. retail
rm (N=277), the authors found that mismatch
between preferred and actual time on household
work was common. Roughly 42% wanted more
time on household work and 18% wanted less.
Working multiple jobs, work schedule unpre-
dictability, and nonstandard work timing con-
tributed to wanting more time on housework.
Findings add to understanding of how low-wage,
precarious employment shapes workers’ ability
to attend to necessary tasks of household man-
agement.
The extensive scholarly literature on household
work highlights the importance of unpaid labor
performed within the home. Routine chores
Current address: School of Social Welfare, Universityof
California, Berkeley, 120 HavilandHall, Berkeley, CA
94720 (astanczyk@berkeley.edu).
∗School of Social Service Administration, University of
Chicago, 969 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637.
This article was edited by Dr. Jennifer Glass.
Key Words: employment, families and work, house-
work/division of labor,low-income families, work hours.
such as grocery shopping, household repairs,
and laundry are essential tasks of everyday life.
Existing research on household work focuses
primarily on the amount of time individuals
spend performing household activities and how
tasks are divided between couples (Bianchi,
Sayer, Milkie, & Robinson, 2012; Coltrane,
2000; Lachance-Grzela & Bouchard, 2010).
This literature has produced important insights
into the social processes that shape household
labor but does not address individuals’ pref-
erences for how much time they would like
to spend on household work or their ability to
fulll those preferences.
In contrast, individuals’ preferences for how
much time to spend on paid employment and
the extent to which these preferences align with
actual paid work hours have received consider-
able scholarly attention. Motivated by concerns
over the increasing prevalence of long work-
ing hours in the United States, studies seek to
assess the extent to which changes in working
time are driven by individualpreferences, as sug-
gested by neoclassical economic theory as well
as by some sociological theory, or by constraints
placed on workers by the economy, employers
and the organization of work, and household
responsibilities (Reynolds & Aletraris, 2006;
Stier & Lewin-Epstein, 2003). Studies have doc-
umented a high prevalence of workers reporting
a mismatch between preferred and actual paid
work hours (Altonji & Paxton, 1988; Reynolds,
2004, 2005; Reynolds & Aletraris, 2006, 2010).
For example, Reynolds (2005) found that, when
asked about ideal work hours, almost two thirds
of U.S. workers reported wanting to spend less
Journal of Marriage and Family 79 (February 2017): 243–260 243
DOI:10.1111/jomf.12344
244 Journal of Marriage and Family
time in paid work, and about 12% would have
preferred more paid work hours. Factors that
inuence nancial need and demands for work
at home, such as educational attainment and
household structure, as well as job characteris-
tics, such as requirements for advancement or
job security and access to scheduling exibil-
ity, play a major role in explaining mismatches
between desired and actual paid work hours
(Altonji & Paxton, 1988; Jacobs & Gerson,
2004; Reynolds, 2004, 2005; Reynolds & Ale-
traris, 2006; Stier & Lewin-Epstein, 2003).
There does not exist a parallel literature on
workers’ preferences for time on unpaid house-
hold work, whether individuals are constrained
in their ability to spend the amount of time they
prefer on household work, and if so, what fac-
tors act as constraints. The processes shaping
time on paid work and housework are distinct.
Yet, given the interconnections between paid
and unpaid labor, the high prevalence of paid
work-hour mismatch suggests there may be a
related discrepancy between the time individu-
als would like to spend on household manage-
ment tasks and the actual time they are able to
devote to this work. Similarly, as job character-
istics help explain the likelihood of mismatch
between desired and actual paid work hours,
it is possible that the structure of paid work
may also help explain workers’ ability to align
preferred and actual time spent on household
labor.
Building knowledge of the prevalence of
household work-hour mismatch and job con-
ditions that may fuel it holds the potential to
reveal yet another way the long arm of paid
work reaches into the personal and family
lives of workers. As many household tasks are
central to individual and family functioning,
mismatch in the direction of wanting more time
on household work may indicate individuals
are struggling to attend to tasks essential to
everyday life, and this desire may be related
to conditions of work shown to undermine
family well-being in other ways. Moreover,
just as studies have found that paid work-hour
mismatch can lead to poor physical and mental
health (Dooley, 2003; Galinsky, Kim, & Bond,
2001), feelings of not doing enough or doing
too much at home may also be distressing and
diminish individual well-being. Additionally,
attention to household work-hour mismatch
adds complexity to scholarly understanding of
individuals’ feelings about this work. Empir-
ically exploring this neglected dimension of
individuals’ experiences of household work
allows us to challenge the relatively untested
assumption in the housework literature that most
would prefer to spend less time on housework,
an assumption that undergirds a popular theo-
retical account of how women use the power
that accompanies increased earnings to bargain
or to buy themselves out of doing housework
(Coltrane 2000; Lachance-Grzela & Bouchard,
2010).
In this article, we explore mismatch between
preferred and actual time on household work
and how characteristics of paid work contribute
to this mismatch among women in low-wage,
hourly retail jobs. Data come from original sur-
veys and rm administrative records on a sam-
ple of female, low-wage, hourly employees of
a major U.S. retail rm. The focus on women
reects the composition of the hourly work-
force at the focal rm and seems an appropri-
ate rst step in this line of research. Women
continue to spend considerably more time than
men engaged in household work (Bianchi et al.,
2012; Lachance-Grzela & Bouchard, 2010), and
experiences of household work-hour mismatch
likely operate differently for men and women
because of the gendered nature of this work.
We seek to make three contributions to the
literatures on housework and work hour prefer-
ences. First, we employ a measure of mismatch
between preferred and actual time on household
work comparable to those commonly used in the
work-hour preference literature to document the
prevalence of wanting to spend more, the same,
or less time on household work among this sam-
ple of retail workers. This research extends the
work-hour preference literature into the realm of
unpaid labor and at the same time introduces the
novel dimension of household work-hour mis-
match into the housework literature. Our next
contribution is to identify paid-work-related fac-
tors that may constrain the ability of workers
to align actual and preferred time on household
labor. We estimate a series of multinomial logis-
tic models to assess how characteristics of paid
work prevalent among low-wage, hourly work-
ers help explain wanting to spend more, less, or
the same time on household work
We make a nal contribution by exploring
these relationships among a population rela-
tively neglected in the work-hour preferences
and housework literatures: workers in low-wage,
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