Wives’ earnings, gender role attitudes, and intrahousehold housework time allocations: Evidence from China

Although the rise in women’s labor force participation has improved women’s socio-economic status, it has not led to a commensurate decline in their share of intrahousehold housework over the past half-century—a phenomenon often referred to as the “gender stall.” Using longitudinal data from the 2012–2022 China Family Panel Studies and a two-way fixed-effects model with a lagged independent variable approach, this study examines how wives’ earnings share affects their housework time in China. We construct a novel index to measure couple-level gender role attitudes and investigate whether the association between wives’ relative earnings and intrahousehold housework time allocation varies across households with different couple-level GRA profiles. The results show that, overall, a higher wives’ earnings share is significantly associated with a shorter wives’ housework time. However, the effects are heterogeneous across households. In couples where both spouses hold egalitarian gender role attitudes, a higher wives’ earnings share significantly reduces wives’ housework time, consistent with the relative resources theory. By contrast, in couples where both spouses hold traditional (inegalitarian) attitudes, the effect of wives’ earnings share is statistically insignificant, supporting the “doing gender” hypothesis.