Couples’ housework division among immigrants and natives – the role of women’s economic resources

Abstract

Previous literature has intensively examined gender differences in housework hours among couples. However, analyses on immigrant couples are rare, despite the highly uneven division of their household labor. By testing competing theoretical explanations, this study focused on the impact of immigrant wives’ labor market integration on couples’ division of housework time. Using longitudinal representative data for Germany from 1995–2019, we applied fixed effects estimations to examine the effect of immigrant and native-born wives’ income and labor market entry on the housework time of both wives and husbands. Immigrant wives barely adjusted their housework times due to relative or absolute income changes, which can be explained by immigrant couples’ traditional orientation together with their lower social and labor market integration. Among native-born wives, increasing housework time with increasing relative income – a behavior also possibly determined by traditional gender values – was observed only when they earned more than 60 percent of the couples’ total income. Furthermore, the high gender differences in housework time gave immigrant husbands flexibility to respond to their wives’ labor market integration, as proposed by the relative resources perspective.