Marriage and union formation, families and households

The relative resources perspective of domestic labor argues that wives’ housework time falls as their share of couple’s income rises. In contrast, the autonomy perspective views wife’s own earnings as a much better predictor of her housework time. However, the extent to which the two perspectives will be supported may depend on social contexts. Capitalizing on comparison of Mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong, I find that the ability of wife’s relative or absolute earnings in reducing housework time depends more on gender ideology than on macro-level economic development. In societies with less equal gender ideology, wives’ relative earnings are more influential, because the reduction in their housework time is largely led by bargaining on housework division with the husbands. While in societies with more equal gender ideology, instead of bargaining, wives could autonomously reduce their housework time by purchasing market substitutes as their own income increases. The results reveal not only that wife’s economic bargaining power in housework allocation is context-specific, but that the contextual variation of the bargaining power may depend more on gender ideology than on macro-level economic development.

We use data from the Birth to Twenty Cohort study in Johannesburg, South Africa to 1) describe trajectories of father involvement over the early life course of children and 2) examine the association between trajectories and the union dynamics of parents. We use sequence analysis to describe patterns of paternal engagement using residential and non-residential contact and the receipt of financial support as measures of involvement. We use multinomial logit models to examine the influence of union dissolution of parents and subsequent union formation of mothers on patterns of father involvement. Preliminary results suggest that 40% of children experience uninterrupted contact with fathers; 14% begin life having contact but lose it permanently at some point and the rest experience interrupted periods of contact. We find that children who experience parental union dissolution later in life have higher odds of having continuous contact with and support from their fathers post dissolution.