The uneven burden of contraception: couples’ resources, gender beliefs, and women’s exposure to method-level contraceptive labor

This study examines how couples’ relative resources and gender ideology shape women’s exposure to method-level burdens embedded in contraceptive methods in Germany. Contraceptive labor is conceptualized as the physical, financial, and psychosocial costs and risks structurally embedded in contraceptive methods and unequally distributed between women and men. Using nationally representative data from the German Family Demography Panel Study (FReDA), we assign partnered women aged 18–49 a method-specific Contraceptive Labor Score (CLS) capturing these structural burdens. Regression analyses show limited support for resource-based explanations: relative employment is not associated with women’s exposure to method-level contraceptive burdens, while women who are more highly educated than their partners are more likely to be exposed to methods with higher CLS values. In contrast, the gender ideology hypothesis holds: women with traditional gender beliefs face higher method-level burdens than egalitarian women. Supplementary analyses using contraceptive efficacy as an alternative outcome show that exposure to method-level burdens does not fully correspond to contraceptive effectiveness. By linking couple-level inequalities to structural characteristics of contraceptive methods, this study extends research on the gendered division of unpaid work to reproductive labor and highlights the role of institutionalized contraceptive arrangements in sustaining women’s disproportionate responsibility for fertility control.