Gender disparities in housework in France: lessons from last 25 years

In developed countries, there has been large progress towards gender equality in many fields, in particular employment. However, gender inequalities are still huge in the domestic sphere. In particular women still perform the bulk of domestic and parental tasks in spite of the dramatic increase in the number of dual-earner couples. The aim of this study is twofold. First it intends to describe the long term evolution of male and female involvement in housework and parenting. Second, it aims at disentangle factors that plays in favor of an increasing or a decreasing of gender gap in housework, i.e. technical progress, changes in family structure, social changes and changes of norms. The three last French time-use surveys provide a unique tool to analyze the evolution and the determinants of gender gap in housework during the last 25 years. We show that male involvement evolves extremely slowly while that of women decreases. Using Oaxaca decomposition techniques, we conclude that changes in family structure, the level of female education and labor market participation and in domestic equipment explain the decrease of gender gap in housework but the persistence of traditional roles of men and women acts as a brake on these changes.