gender, class, and social desirability

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Wives' and husbands' housework reporting: Gender, class, and social desirabilityGender & Society; Thousand Oaks; Apr 1998;Julie E Press;Eleanor Townsley;Volume: 12Issue: 2Start Page: 188-218ISSN: 08912432Subject

Terms:

Polls & surveysHouseworkSex rolesSocial classes

Abstract:Press and Townsley place recent research about changes in wives' and husbands' domestic labor in the context of well-known reportin

differences between different kinds of housework surveys.

Full Text:

Copyright Sage Publications, Inc. Apr

1998[Headnote]

This investigation places recent research about changes irr wives' and husbands' domestic labor in the context of well-known reportingdifferences between different kinds of housework surveys. An analysis of the "reporting gap" between direct-question reports ofhousework hours from the National Survey of Families and Households (1988) and time-diary reports from Americans' Use of Tme, 19shows that both husbands and wives overreport their housework contributions. Furthermore, gender attitudes, total housework, class,education, income, family size, and employment status together significantly affect the overreport, although the variables operate indifferent ways for wives and husbands. It is concluded that changing and uneven social perceptions of fhe appropriate domestic roles owomen and men have resulted in reporting biases that do not necessarily correspond to actual changes in housework behavior Thesefindings cast doubt on claims that contemporary husbands are doing more housework than their predecessors.A central issue of housework research is the degree to which different household members' unpaid contributions to the household havechanged in recent decades. Studies have shown consistently, for example, that in this era of married women's rising labor forceparticipation, employed wives have reduced dramatically their contribution to domestic labor. The consequence is that husbands' sharethe housework burden, relative to their wives', has increased (Coverman and Sheley 1986; Marini and Shelton 1993; Robinson 1980,1988). This research suggests further that some husbands-particularly more egalitarian, younger, better educated husbands-have increatheir contribution to housework in absolute terms. These findings are, however, much smaller and less significant than those for wives.Evidence from longitudinal research about the size and nature of husbands' increased housework contributions is mixed (Coverman andSheley 1986; Gershuny and Robinson 1988; Robinson 1988), and increases found in cross-sectional studies are small, not very robust, often fail to reach statistical significance (Stafford 1980; Stein 1984).Despite the inconsistencies, husbands' small increases in housework have been greeted as a triumph of changing gender attitudes. In thlate 1980s Gershuny and Robinson concluded that "[m]en's increase in domestic work time . . . must presumably reflect a change innorms" (1988, 5;5). Pleck (1982, in Coverman and Sheley 1986) has argued that "men's family work" has increased to the degree that

testifies "to the magnitude of change in social values about men's roles in the family." Recent popular reports have echoed and magnifithis theme, waxing rhapsodically about the "sensitive new age man" who is learning to participate more equally with his wife in traditiodomestic chores (e.g., Warrick 1994).We challenge these findings with a model of the "reporting gap" that combines information from two widely used data sets, tie NationaSurvey of Families and Households (Sweet, Bumpass, and Call 1988) and Americans' Use of Time, 1985 (Robinson 1985a). The reporgap we find is large enough to overshadow the small increases in husbands' housework observed in recent years and casts serious doubclaims that husbands in the 1980s increased their domestic labor contributions. Indeed, we suggest that observed increases in husbandshousework contributions may be explained by overreporting behavior.Reporting differences across housework surveys using different kinds of methods have been documented since the mid-1970s.' Studieshave found consistently that when women and men are asked direct questions about housework time, estimates are higher than when tidiaries are employed to ascertain the same information (for a review, see Marini and Shelton 1993). The mechanisms causing reportinflation across survey contexts remain in some dispute, however, since strictly comparable direct-question and time-diary measures fosingle set of respondents do not yet exist (although see Warner 1986). Reporting differences across survey methods have been variousl

attributed to random error (Granbois and Willett 1970), recall or memory problems associated with the frequency or quantity ofhousework performed (Hill 1985), double-counting of tasks that respondents perform simultaneously (Juster and Stafford 1991; Robins1985b), or better information possessed by those who do the most housework, namely, wives (Fenstermaker Berk and Shih 1980; Warn1986, see note 2). Against these arguments, we hypothesize that report inflation across surveys is deeply gendered. Drawing on findingfrom Arlie Hochschild's (1989) classic study, The Second Shift, we argue that report inflation in the direct-question context is the outcoof different and uneven social perceptions of the appropriate roles of women and men in the domestic division of labor.In what follows, we limit our study to the four most frequently performed, female-typed household tasks: preparing meals, washing discleaning the house, and doing laundry. These are the only strictly comparable tasks across the two surveys. Operationally narrowing thdefinition of housework should not affect the salience of our general findings, however, because there is evidence that husbands haveincreased their contributions to these four tasks since the mid- 1970s (Robinson 1988). Indeed, we argue that if any significant change the division ofhousehold labor is to occur, it will necessarily involve these tasks, because they together comprise more than 50 percenthe total housework performed in contemporary U.S. marriages (Coverman 1989). Moreover, by using only these four most frequently
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performed, female-typed tasks, we can control for the potentially confounding influences of task frequency, the gender typing of tasks,the possibility of gender interactions with double-counting.HYPOTHESESMemory, Double-Counting, and InformationResearchers have found that report inflation in direct-question contexts compared with diary contexts is highest for the most frequentlyperformed female-typed household tasks like preparing meals, washing dishes, cleaning the house, and doing laundry (Marini and Shel1993). Several different explanations for this phenomenon have been offered. Hill (1985) suggests that individual reporting inconsistenfor less frequently performed tasks like repair and maintenance work can be attributed to measurement error associated with respondenmemory. Since there is a longer recall period for these tasks, individuals provide lower estimates in a direct-question context than theywould if they were surveyed by the diary method on the day they were actually doing the task. Another explanation of reporting error i

that direct questions produce higher estimates than the time-diary method for these tasks, because they are likely to include double-counting of tasks that are performed simultaneously (Juster and Stafford 1991). In other words, as task frequency and total houseworkincrease, so does the report inflation in direct questions compared with time-diary questions.These arguments yield a first hypothesis: If the overreport between surveys is a cognitive phenomenon connected to generic features ofhuman memory or to a general misunderstanding of direct housework questions leading to double-counting, then report inflation on thefour tasks should display a similar pattern for wives and husbands. That is, as total housework on these four frequently performed tasksincreases, the overreport should increase in lockstep for both women and men.Specifically, this hypothesis predicts that although the average estimates of domestic labor time may be inflated for both husbands andwives, slope differences should not be present (Coverman 1983, note 6). This idea also underpins the argument that there is a relativelystable ranking of different subgroups' time use, regardless of what method is used, such that housewives perform the most housework,followed by employed wives, and then employed husbands. Several of the leading researchers in the field agree that notwithstandingsampling differences and problems of comparability between major direct-question and time-diary surveys, "correlations betweendemographic variables and time spent on various activities have been found to be similar using the two methods" (Marini and Shelton1993; Robinson 1977, 1985a). We do not challenge this finding. We do emphasize, however, that findings about the ordinal ranking ofsubgroups-that the averages are different but the slopes are not-should not be confused with arguments about increases in husbands 'contributions to family workin recent years. While data from either the time-diary or direct-question method can be used to adequateldocument the overall shape of the housework distribution among subgroups, this does not give us any information with which to evalusmall changes over time among subgroups, such as the one documented for husbands. The observed increase for husbands could easilyan artifact of the overreport across surveys.A second and connected finding about report: inflation is that wives have a higher average overreport between surveys than husbandsbecause they continue to do the overwhelming majority of these four tasks in contemporary American marriages (Marini and Shelton1993). Building on the first hypothesis, this second one simply observes that since wives do more housework :han husbands, their repoinflation is likely to be higher than husbands'.Contrary to these expectations is the third hypothesis that wives' reports of their housework are likely to be more accurate than husbandreports because wives have better information. This is an extension of arguments in the spousal consensus literature that state that wiveare better estimators of housework time because they do a disproportionate share of domestic labor and therefore have better informatiabout it (Fenstermaker Berk and Shih 1980; Warner 1986).2 The logic of this argument is gender neutral since it suggests that individu

who do the most housework will be the most reliable informant:s because they have the best information. If this third hypothesis is corwe expect to find not only that women will have a smaller average reporting gap across surveys than men because they do morehousework than men, but that women who do more housework will have a smaller reporting gap than women who do less housework, that men who do more housework will have a smaller reporting gap than men who do less housework. That is, we expect that as totalhousework increases, the information needed to estimate household contributions accurately also increases, and therefore reportinginflation should be smaller.Social Desirability and Reporting BehaviorAgainst these three hypotheses, which are all largely concerned with the accuracy of different kinds of housework reports, we argue hethat overreports across surveys are substantively gendered. They are evidence of important differences in social perceptions of whatconstitute appropriate levels of housework for women and men in contemporary American marriages. An increasingly egalitarian gendideology for both women and men (Sapiro 1991; Simon and Landis 1989), rising rates of married women's labor force participation (UCensus Bureau 1960, 1970; U.S. Department of Labor 1991, 1993; for a discussion of historical trends see Bianchi and Spain 1986), anpopular reports that men are beginning to do more housework have arguably raised expectations that husbands will start to share unpai

family workmore equally with their wives. While this may have led some husbands to do more housework in fact, it is also possible thhusbands who are cognizant of these shifts in societal expectations may say they do more housework than they actually do. Wehypothesize that husbands most vulnerable to such normative societal pressure are those who avow egalitarian gender attitudes, and sinegalitarian attitudes are correlated with age and education, we expect that more educated and younger husbands are likely to feel pressuto do more housework and/or overreport their housework contributions.Hochschild's (1989) well-known ethnographic work on the "second shift" suggests further that there might be contradictory effects arisfrom interactions between class location, educational levels, and gender attitudes. Although educated husbands are more likely to profeegalitarian gender attitudes, she found that among those husbands she interviewed, educated liberal husbands actually performedsurprisingly little housework. In the context of the present study, we hypothesize that this mismatch between actual housework andegalitarian gender attitudes is likely to produce a large overreport. By contrast, Hochschild found that working-class husbands withemployed wives were more likely to profess traditional gender attitudes but, because of income and time constraints associated with claposition, many of them actually shared the domestic burden more equally with their wives. In this case, we expect to find that traditionhusbands will overreport at a lower rate than other husbands.


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It is likely that wives feel the pressure of social norms also, although there is reason to expect that the mechanisms producing reportingdiscrepancies among wives are different from those of husbands. Despite growing expectations that husbands will share housework moequally with their wives, the majority of both women and men in the contemporary United States believe that wives are primarilyresponsible for housework and child care. Fully 84.4 percent of married men and 88.2 percent of married women surveyed for the NatiSurvey of Families and Households reported that they "agreed" or "strongly agreed" with the statement that "it is much better for everyif the man earns the main living and the woman takes care of the home and family." Moreover, Hochschild found that even among thoscouples in her study who professed egalitarian attitudes about the domestic division of labor, most wives still took primary responsibilifor housework. In this context of gender-specific expectations about the appropriate roles of wives and husbands in the domestic divisiof labor, we expect to find first that wives continue to perform the vast majority of housework. Second, we suggest that these widespregender-specific beliefs about domestic roles give rise to gender-specific expectations about the particular amounts of housework husba

and wives should perform, which, in turn, is reflected in wives' reporting behavior. Since both women and men expect that wives willperform much more housework than husbands, we hypothesize not only that wives will perform more housework than husbands, onaverage, but that the size of wives' overreport will be correspondingly larger as they attempt to meet social expectations about wifely roSuch a finding would be in line with earlier studies (Marini and Shelton 1993).Third, we argue that social expectations about wives' housework contributions are also likely to be structured by wives' education andclass position, similarly to husbands'. However, in the gendered climate of social expectations described above, we hypothesize that thepattern of overreporting will be reversed for wives. While we expect egalitarian, educated husbands to overreport more than traditionalworking-class husbands, we expect that privileged women, especially those who earn income of their own, are more likely to report thehousework accurately than poorer women confronting the time constraints of housework, child care, and employment. This is our"supermom" hypothesis: Privileged women with sufficiently large incomes of their own are more able to "buy their way" out of timeconstraints associated with housework and child care, thus fulfilling genderspecific social expectations about their domestic roles, leadto more accurate housework reporting. By contrast, it is possible that less-privileged working moms who face the conflict between timeconstraints and social expectations may overreport their housework to meet social expectations about wifely roles that are increasinglydifficult to meet (and this may be especially true if these women are confronting a middle-class, educated survey taker). Suchoverreporting occurred among many of the employed wives interviewed in Hochschild's qualitative ethnographic study.DATA AND RESEARCH STRATEGYConceptualizing the Reporting GapTo investigate these competing hypotheses, we focus on the size of the reporting gap. That is, how many housework hours do respondereport to survey takers compared with the number of hours they spend doing housework? Operationally, we measure the gap betweendirect-question reports of time spent in housework from the National Survey of Families and Households (NSFH) (Sweet, Bumpass, anCall 1988) and time-diary reports from Americans' Use of Time, 1985 (AUT) (Robinson 1985a). The AUT time-diary data are treated the baseline for housework in our model, despite the possibility that report inflation probably occurs to some extent even when this metis used. But in the absence of ideal data from our problem we are satisfied with this, since time-diary data have been found to be the mostable, reliable, and valid way to measure time spent in housework in many studies (Juster and Stafford 1985; Robinson 1977, 1985a;Scheuch 1972; Walker 1968; Szalai 1966). Indeed, if we can document that it is not general memory or cognitive factors that structure overreport between surveys but rather uneven and gendered perceptions of changing domestic roles, this is good evidence that the biasarising from overreporting is a substantive gender phenomenon and that the problem affects time-diary as well as direct-question repor

of housework data.While earlier studies have compared average reporting differences across surveys (Marini and Shelton 1993; Pleck 1985), they have beplagued with problems of comparability between questions, differences between the tasks enumerated by different surveys, and samplidifferences. In this study, by contrast, we have limited ourselves to highly comparable questions and categories and have devised a waydirectly compare different reports in a single model for a nationally representative sample of married women and men. By combininginformation from the surveys, we can estimate directly a distribution of individual measures of the reporting gap between diary and dirquestion housework reports.DataThe National Survey of Families and Households is a national probability sample of 13,017 adults interviewed between March 1987 anMay 1988 (Bumpass and Sweet 1985; Sweet, Bumpass, and Call 1988). The NSFH contains a wealth of information about respondentsociodemographic characteristics and household activities. Participants were interviewed in person and certain sets of questions were sadministered to respondents. The housework question was the first of these self-administered portions. Interviewers handed respondentform to read and fill out during the interview that asked them to "Write in the approximate number of hours per week that you . . .

normally spend doing the following things." The selection of tasks includes preparing meals, washing dishes, cleaning house, outdoortasks, shopping, washing and ironing, paying bills, auto maintenance, and driving. Note that there was no prohibition against overlappireports in the NSFH instrument. That is, two of the tasks might have been done at the same time and reported as 10 minutes each for thsame 10-minute period, for example, which may have resulted in an increase in respondents' direct-question reports as an artifact of thequestion wording.In contrast, the data used as the baseline of housework hours were drawn from the third round of the Michigan time-budget study,Americans' Use of Time, 1985, also a national probability sample (Robinson, 1985a). A more restrictive survey instrument than the NSthis questionnaire asked 4,939 respondents to record in single-day time diaries each activity they engaged in over a 24-hour period. Diawere collected by telephone, mail-back, and; personal interviews. The sampling universe included adults of at least 18 years who livedhouseholds with telephones. Diary days for the sample were evenly distributed across days of the week. Respondents were required to in their diaries the time the activity began and the time it ended. They were also asked to record primary, secondary, and tertiary activitduring each time period, in case more than one activity occurred simultaneously. We use data for the primary activity only. Comparedwith the NSFH, then, the AUT had the advantage of compelling respondents, at least nominally, to time their domestic labor while they


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did it, producing a more detailed and, arguably, more reliable account. The trade-off, however, is that despite providing detail andaccuracy in housework reporting, the AUT sample provides only limited sociodemographic data. Since the rich information aboutcohabiting couples and the variety of household structures provided by the NSFH were not included in the AUT, our study is limited toindividual married women and men.3 When only married respondents are selected, there are 6,882 cases in the NSFH sample and 2,84cases in the AUT sample.4 We applied sample weights to both data sets so they would be nationally representative and used a day weigprovided by the authors of the AUT to account for differences in the day of the week that diaries were kept.Measuring Housework: Gender-Stereotyped Tasks and the Synthetic Week The first issue to be resolved in analyzing the two surveys wwhether the daily estimates produced under the AUT method could be aggregated into meaningful synthetic weekly estimates that werecomparable with those in the NSFH. Since the AUT time-diary study takes a 24-hour period as its unit of analysis, many activities thatdone weekly (like mowing the lawn), or less often (like cleaning the oven or repairing the car), will not be captured in the diary for a la

percentage of respondents.5 A connected source of potential bias is gender differences in reporting across days of the week. We know women perform the bulk of these four household tasks and it is possible that while wives may perform these tasks daily, husbands mayperform these tasks at their discretion, resulting in large reports from husbands on the weekends and small reports on weekdays. Toinvestigate this possibility, we compared the average reports of housework on these four tasks for each day of the week and by gender.Results are documented in Figure 1, which shows very little variation in average housework for either husbands or wives across the dayof the week. (As expected, of course, there is a large total weekly difference between wives and husbands.) An analysis of varianceperformed on the distribution of reports across weekend and week days, as well as gender, showed no significant differences. Thus, wehave confidence in our construction of synthetic weekly reports for the AUT respondents for these four tasks. We constructed syntheticweeks by aggregating housework hours for the four included tasks and by multiplying the sum by seven.6MethodOur analysis proceeds in two parts. First, we predict respondents' housework contributions in the NSFH sample from a model ofhousework contributions in the AUT time-diary sample. In the time-diary sample, 47.1 percent of husbands report zero hours ofhousework each week, while only 5.5 percent of wives report zero. The amount reporting zero in the direct-question sample is 20.9percent for husbands and 0.5 percent for wives. Including all the zero responses in our analysis using ordinary regression techniques wproduce inconsistent estimates and would dramatically inflate the size of husbands' reporting gap across the surveys. Therefore, we isothose who report zero hours of housework from those who report some housework and treat them separately. The method for doing thia censored regression model for limited dependent variables, also known as a Tobit model. Specifically, we use ordinary least squares(OLS) regression modified by a two-step Heckman procedure (Berk 1983; Heckman 1976; Maddala 1983).7 The Heckman procedure designed to account for the fact that housework is inherently censored at zero and that there is a high percentage of husbands reportingzero housework hours.8

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The next step in our construction of a measure of the reporting gap across the surveys is to apply the OLS model produced by theHeckman procedure on the AUT to the NSFH respondents to estimate how much housework they would have reported if we also hadtime-diary responses for them. To do this, we merely multiply the estimated coefficients from our AUT model by the values of thosevariables for each respondent in the NSFH. Equation 1 shows this operation algebraically. (The resulting coefficients are presented latein Table 4.) This operation produces a variable in the NSFH sample that provides an estimate of diary-reported housework hours per wfor each respondent. where b(^sub o...n^ ) are the estimated regression coefficients and X(^l... n^) are the values of the independentvariables for each respondent.In the second step of our analysis, we subtract this total housework prediction from the direct-question report provided by each respondin the NSFH, a difference we term the reporting gap. Finally, we use multiple regression analysis to examine correlates of the reportinggap.Our method relies on three assumptions. The first assumption is that the two sets of respondents are interchangeable; that is, since theyboth based on national probability samples, weighted to represent the U.S. population, we can think of them as two random subsamplefrom the same census. We are satisfied that the samples are quite similar because Table 1 shows no substantial differences between the

distributions of respondents across a range of background characteristics, although the NSFH respondents are slightly upscale. Second,assume that two nationally representative samples will produce errors across the two data sets that are largely uncorrelated. Third, weassume that time-diary data are a relatively accurate measure of the amount of time people spend doing housework. As a corollary, weassume there is no gender difference in the measurement error associated with the diary reports.Explanatory VariablesThe first part of the analysis uses the following variables to estimate hours spent in female-typed housework tasks. Gender is a dummyvariable coded 1 for females and 0 for males. In addition, we control for six well-established predictors of housework hours:1. number of paid work hours (continuous),2. a six-category ordinal education variable,3. a four-category ordinal household income variable,4. number of children younger than 5 (continuous),5. number of children aged 5 to 18 (continuous)y, and6. a two-level dummy variable for age cohort with those born before 1950 coded as
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The set of possible controls was limited to these six variables because they are the only relevant predictors of housework that arecomparable across the two surveys. Table I compares the explanatory variables from the NSFH and the AUT. This profile describes horespondents are distributed on the six independent variables and demonstrates that the two samples are highly comparable. Figures shohere are weighted and include only cases that are nol missing on any of the independent variables or the dependent variable.9

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The distributions of the explanatory variables used in the reporting gap models in the second part of our analysis are presented in TableSince investigation of the reporting gap takes place wholly in the context of the NSFH sample, comparability limitations are lifted and

selection of more theoretically driven variables and codings is enabled. Measures include gender (1 = female), predicted total housewohours, predicted total housework hours squared (to allow for the possibility of nonlinearity), paid work hours (continuous), number ofchildren in the household (continuous), household income in $10,000s (continuous), age (continuous), education (four dummy variableand socioeconomic index as precoded in the NSFH (smaller numbers are lower socioeconomic status).In addition, a gender ideology scale was constructed by standardizing and summing six attitude items about gender roles in families, wlower numbers signifying more traditional attitudes and higher numbers signifying more egalitarian attitudes. The individual attitudescales asked respondents for approval ratings of (1) mothers who work full-time when their youngest child is younger than 5 and (2)mothers who work part-time when their youngest child is younger than 5. Also asked was extent of agreement on four items: It is muchbetter for everyone if the man earns the main living and the woman takes care of the home and family; preschool children are likely tosuffer if their mother is employed; parents should encourage just as much independence in their daughters as in their sons; and if ahusband and a wife both work full-time, they should share household tasks equally (see Lennon and Rosenfield 1994 for an in-depthdiscussion of this scale).ANALYSISThe Two-Sample Comparison: A Tale of Two GapsThe preliminary evidence that a reporting gap exists is shown in Table 3, which documents the distribution of housework hours reportethe time-diary sample and compares it with reports from the direct-question sample. Using either survey method as the measure, wivesmuch more housework than husbands. If we take the time-diary measure as the most accurate, husbands spend an average of less than quarter of the time wives do (4.2/18.4 hours) performing these four household tasks each week. This corroborates what is already well-known about the domestic division of labor. Second, the direct-question estimates are much higher than the time-diary reports for bothwives and husbands. These differences suggest that, regardless of gender, respondents tend to overreport their contributions to housewowhen a survey gives them the opportunity to do so. On average, wives estimate they perform about 31.8 hours a week but only recordabout 18.4 hours in the time diaries. Husbands self-report their housework at 7.7 hours per week but record only 4.2 hours in the diarieTable 3 also shows that there is a gender gap in overreporting. Wives overreport their housework contributions on average by 13.4 houper week (31.8 - 18.4) compared with husbands' average overreport of about 3.5 hours per week (7.7 -4.2). These means tell a tale of twgaps between the surveys: a reporting gap, in which direct-question estimates of housework tend to be overestimates for everybody, angender gap in overreporting, in which wives tend to exaggerate by more than husbands do. However, although this comparison ofunconditional means provides prima facie support for hypotheses about double-counting and memory effects, individual-level data in a

multivariate context are required to determine what factors explain the reporting gap phenomenon.Estimating the Reporting Gap in a Multivariate ContextTo estimate time-diary reports of total housework for each individual in the NSFH, we modeled housework in the AUT time-diary samand used the model to compute housework in the NSFH. Results of the AUT model of housework are shown in Table 4. We multipliedcoefficients in Table 4 by the values of those variables in the NSFH, summing the results for each respondent. This prediction is our beestimate of the time-diary report of weekly housework hours for each respondent in the NSFH.

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To compute the reporting gap, we subtracted the prediction of total weekly housework from each NSFH respondent's self-report. Theresulting distribution describes a new variable that can now be analyzed to assess the effects of gender, gender attitudes, and totalhousework on reporting behavior between the surveys.Reporting Gaps and Putative Increases in Husbands' HouseworkTable 5 confirms what we found using mean differences across the samples, lending credibility to the robustness of the predictive modWives' average reporting gap of 12.8 hours per week in absolute terms is nearly twice as big as husbands' (5.8 hours per week). Noticehowever, that in relative terms, when the overreport is placed in the context of the total amount of time respondents spent doing these fhousehold tasks, husbands are found to overreport at a much higher rate than wives: 149 percent (5.8/3.9) compared with 68 percent(12.8/18.7), respectively, if mean values are used.Even if we ignore this relative overreport, however, and limit the analysis to the lower estimate of husbands' overreport in absolute term

5.8 hours a week is still large enough to account for the increase in husbands' housework contributions claimed in recent studies. Forexample, Gershuny and Robinson's (1988) analysis of housework contributions to all unpaid household tasks (excluding shopping andtravel) between 1975 and 1985 finds an increase for husbands of only 2.3 more hours each week." They found a similar increase amonBritish husbands between 1974 and 1984. Older studies report similar increases for earlier periods (Davis 1983; Stafford 1980). All ofthese observed increases for husbands could be explained easily by overreports such as the one we uncover.At issue is the interpretation of observed increases in husbands' housework. If there is report inflation across the surveys, can suchincreases be adduced as evidence of changes in husbands' family roles and gender values? If the overreport can be explained as a generphenomenon affecting husbands and wives similarly, then report inflation in the direct-question context might be dismissed as a techniproblem and the small increases found in hus;bands' housework over time interpreted safely as a change in the family division of labormany researchers have observed. However, if we find evidence of large and significant gender differences, then overreporting becomesmuch more than simply a technical problem. In what follows, we test these hypotheses.Analyzing the Reporting Gap: Gender, Information, Double-Counting, and MemoryResults of multiple regression to analyze the reporting gap are presented in Table 6. This model tests the effects of all the variables for full population of husbands and wives to evaluate the magnitude and significance of the gender effect on overreporting behavior. Tabledocuments that gender is a very large and highly significant predictor of overreporting. Net of the other independent variables, wives alikely to overreport 16.63 more hours a week than husbands, and this is by far the largest effect in the model. In short, the equation inTable 6 confirms our hypothesis that overreporting is, indeed, gendered even when controlling for socioeconomic factors. Next, we brethe analysis down by gender to investigate whether or not overreporting behavior is structured similarly for wives and husbands."Recall that the hypotheses about double-counting, memory, and information all predict overreporting behavior to be patterned similarlyboth genders. In contrast to the three gender-neutral hypotheses, we argue that perceptions of the social desirability of doing a great deahousework are gendered and that gender differences across a range of characteristics will explain how wives' and husbands' overreportbehavior is structured. Models 1 and 3 in Table 7 show the analysis of the reporting gap broken down by gender, and it is immediatelyapparent that the findings are quite different for women and men.First, the negative association between level of total housework and the reporting gap is much smaller for husbands than wives. A one-hour increase in total housework each week decreases wives' overreport by about 2 hours and 23 minutes a week. For husbands, thedecrease is only about 45 minutes a week. The negative relationships between total housework and the reporting gap for both spousessuggest that we reject the argument that overreports are primarily the product of double-counting or that overreports are associated with

generic human memory problems that lead to report inflation in the direct-question context. Rather, the more housework a respondentperforms, the more accurately he or she reports housework contributions on a survey-one prediction of the information hypothesis. Thiresult is illustrated in Figure 2, which depicts the reporting gap for wives and husbands over relevant ranges of total housework, based models 1 and 3?2

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However, the effects of information associated with total housework are not gender neutral. The much steeper negative slope for wivesindicates that information operates more effectively for wives than for husbands, a difference that is statistically significant at the .OS l(see Jccard, Turrisi, and Wan 1990, 49 for a discussion of this statistical test). Perhaps wives experience a greater increase in reportingaccuracy with additional levels of information because they perform more housework on average; the higher levels of wives' average tohousework would tug at the regression line, affecting the slope for women as a group.

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The most important point here, however, is that there is very little actual overlap in the gender distributions. One could use the reportingap models to make predictions beyond the range of the data to investigate what would happen to wives' reporting gap at low levels oftotal housework and what would happen to husbands' reporting gap at high levels of total housework However, these may be illegitimacounterfactuals, given the tiny number of wives doing low levels of housework and the complete absence of husbands doing high levelhousework. Oversampling these unusual groups of wives and husbands in future research may be the only way to address counterfactu
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questions such as these directly, and even then, it is unclear that findings would be generalizable to the ret of the population. What we csay is that the information hypothesis is partially confirmed by this analysis since the overreport decreases as total housework increasesboth wives and husbands, net of other effects. We must also conclude, however, that the information associated with higher levels of tohousework operates in a gendered way, with a strong negative effect for wives and a weak negative effect for husbands.The Social Desirability Hypothesis: Gender, Toted Housework, and ClassThe idea that propensities to overreport are gendered is also supported by the finding in Table 7 that the effects of attitudes toward genroles in the family on the reporting gap operate inversely for wives and husbands. This process was masked in the first model based onwhole population (Table 6). Once the analysis is broken down by gender, however, we find that egalitarian wives overreport by less thatraditional wives, since, we argue, egalitarian wives are less vulnerable to normative gender expectations about their housework aswomen's work. We also find that egalitarian husbands overreport by more than traditional husbands for the same reason-traditional

normative expectations are of a husband who does little housework.To test these arguments further, we included two dummy variables in the regression model for men to capture the interaction betweenhusbands' gender attitudes and total housework. The first dummy variable is coded 1 for those husbands professing egalitarian genderattitudes but doing little housework (3.8 percent of the sample), and all other husbands are coded 0. The second dummy variable identithose men with traditional gender attitudes who contribute comparatively high levels of total unpaid work to the household (13.3 perceof the sample). Table 8 compares these two groups of husbands on the variables in the model. It confirms our belief that we are tappingclass difference in reporting behavior with these measures. Those egalitarian husbands who do little housework are much more likely thighly educated, to earn more income, and to work longer hours in the labor market than those husbands who profess traditional attitudbut perform comparatively high levels of total weekly housework.13The fourth column of Table 7 presents the results of this analysis with these two new variables included. The first thing to note is that wthe "Hochschild dummies" in the model for husbands, the effects of all the other independent variables are insignificant.'4 Net of theinteraction between total levels of housework and gender attitudes for these two groups of husbands, the other variables do notsystematically structure husbands' overreports. Second, the effects of the two dummy variables are strong and significant and work in texpected direction.t5 Egalitarian husbands who do little or no house;work overreport nearly three hours more housework each week thother husbands. By contrast, traditional husbands who do comparatively high levels of housework overreport nearly two hours and tweminutes less than other husbands each week. Figure 3 uses model 4 to illustrate this marked relative difference between the averageoverreports of these two kinds of husbands in absolute levels of the reporting gap, controlling for the other independent variables.

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These findings strongly support the gendered social desirability hypothesis since husbands' overreports are shown to be predicted by thinteraction of gender attitudes and total weekly housework on these four tasks. Moreover, once the dummy variables are included in thmodel for husbands, factors that would presumably increase the demand for housework, such as hours spent in paid work and the numbof children at home, appear to have little effect on husbands' overreporting.The proposition that overreporting is gendered is also confirmed by comparing the wide variety of factors affecting wives' propensity tinflate their reports in the direct-question context, relative to husbands (compare models 1 and 3). The number of paid work hours in th

labor market, the number of children at home, household income, gender ideology, education, socioeconomic status, and total housewoall affect the size of wives' overreport. By contrast, in the same model for husbands (model 3), only gender ideology and total housewocontribution affect the reporting gap. And, as discussed above, when interactions between husbands' gender attitude and total housewoare included (model 4), they are the only significant factors found to determine husbands' overreports. These findings suggest that theoverreport may be structured very differently for wives and husbands.Note further that while most of the explanatory variables are found to decrease overreporting for wives, the number of children at homhas a large positive effect on the overreport. For each additional child, wives' average overreport increases by 3.5 hours a week, net of other independent variables. It is possible, given the cultural value placed on children as well as perceptions that children's needs are mimportant than mothers' needs, that gender-specific social expectations about wives' housework become even heavier, and that wives wyoung children overreport their housework contributions at an even higher rate than other wives to meet these heightened expectationsAlthough this argument is difficult to test under current data constraints, the important point here, too, is that this is a gendered findingThe number of children at home has no significant effect on husbands' reporting gap but a large, statistically significant effect on wivesoverreporting behavior.

For this reason, we focus on wives with at least one child to test our "supermom" hypothesis. This states that privileged working motheare able to "buy" their way out of housework and child care and thus meet gendered social expectations and fulfill wifely roles more"easily" than poorer supermoms. Since they fulfill social expectations more easily, we hypothesize that more privileged working motheare likely to report their housework more accurately than other wives. By contrast, we suggest that working mothers facing similar socexpectations as other mothers, but who possess fewer economic resources to substitute for their own labor, are more likely to feel theweight of gendered social expectations about housework more heavily and thus overreport their housework at a higher rate than privileworking mothers. Model 2 in Table 7 includes our supermom variable coded 1 for wives with at least one child at home and who asindividuals, also earn $20,000 or more each year (this cutoff occurs at the 85th percentile of the distribution, identifying reasonablyprivileged waged women).

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The inclusion of the supermom variable in model 2 does not alter the relative size or significance of most of the main effects in the wivequation. It remains true that more highly educated, better paid, higher status wives who are employed full-time in the labor marketoverreport at a lower rate than less-privileged wives in poorer households with lower occupational status or wives who earn no incomethe labor market. However, in addition to these findings, model 2 shows that the coefficient for the supermom dummy is large, negativand significant (see note 19). Wives with at least one child at home who earn $20,000 or more each year are likely to overreport, onaverage, three and one--half hours less each week than other wives. This finding further confirms our argument that overreporting is notechnical problem, operating the same way lor wives and husbands because of question wording or generic human memory problems.Although our models are limited and R-squares are small, our analysis nonetheless persuades us that reporting behavior is a substantivsocial phenomenon rooted in the crosscutting interplay of class and gender for different groups of women and men.16SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION

In sum, we have found first that both husbands and wives tend to overreport their housework contributions. There is a mean overreporthousework of at least 5.8 hours for husbands and 12.8 hours for wives. Recall, however, that when the total amount of time eachrespondent spends in housework is taken into account, the relative overreport is 149 percent for husbands and 68 percent for wives.Second, we have provided evidence that there are large and significant gender (and class) differences in the level and structure ofoverreporting between wives and husbands across survey contexts. Specifically, gender attitudes, which are our best measure ofrespondents' social perceptions about housework, affect husbands' and wives' reporting behavior in opposite directions; traditionalattitudes reduce husbands' reporting gap while they increase wives'. There are also significant gender differences in the effect ofinformation on husbands' and wives' overreports: Higher levels of information reflected by higher levels of total housework lead to mulower overreports for wives than husbands. Differences in the effects of the number of children at home on overreporting are alsogendered; the presence of children increases wives' overreports but has no significant effect on husbands' reporting behavior. Finally, wfound that while more privileged husbands with egalitarian gender attitudes tended to overreport at a higher rate than more traditionalhusbands, more privileged working mothers were likely to report more accurately than poorer "supermoms." This suggests that the effeof gender mediate the effects of class and educational privilege quite differently for wives and husbands. Together, these findingsdemonstrate that the reporting gap between housework surveys cannot be explained fully by memory, double-counting, or informationRather, social desirability in the face of gendered social expectations appears to structure reporting bias.We argue that these findings are the best possible representation of individual overreporting behavior in housework surveys given curredata constraints. Although our study is based on reports for only four stereotypically "female" tasks that are not inclusive of all househotasks performed in contemporary American households, these tasks do comprise the majority of all housework performed (Coverman1989). And, although R-squares are small, our findings about the relationships between gender and overreporting are large and statisticsignificant. Despite limitations, then, we conclude that differences between reports of housework contributions using time-diary anddirect-question report techniqueswhat we have labeled the overreport in our analysis-are socially structured by gender and the interactiof gender with class as survey respondents try to meet changing social expectations about housework.Reflecting in conclusion on these findings, we believe our results have several implications for studies of housework as well as all studthat use quantitative data about gender. First, our findings that husbands and wives overreport their housework in the National Survey oFamilies and Households and that the reporting gap is gendered, suggest that the data that policy makers and analysts rely on areprofoundly affected by gender differences in reporting. This result indicates caution at the very least when using data such as these.The same logic applies to other gender-related data as well. There may be gender differences in reporting in many other sorts of

quantitative data, including timediary data, that are almost impossible to distinguish from the effects of gender on the outcome beingstudied. After all, gender is one of the central axes of social stratification, so gendered reporting differences could affect all kinds ofmeasures of attitudes and behaviors, particularly those clearly connected to gender relations. For example, reports about sexual practicebeliefs about gender roles, attitudes toward social policy initiatives, or the ranking of political candidates on issues like abortion orcontraception could all suffer from gender differences in reporting such as the ones we identify. We would suggest that scholars interesin collecting any kind of attitudinal or behavioral data on gender compare and contrast different measures, building into the data collecprocess close analysis of pretest data to explore the possibility of large gendered reporting effects. Furthermore, given well-knowncomparability problems across surveys, we echo the pleas of earlier researchers that data be collected on time, task, and frequencymeasures of common household tasks, making sure that respondents know that interviewers are interested in primary tasks and thatestimates should not be overlapping.In addition, since caring for children is the major determinant of whether a woman stays at home, it is a very important aspect of thegender division ofhousehold labor. We were not able to include child care as a housework task in our study because of measureincompatibility across surveys. We suggest that studies of housework should better account for the independent and combined

relationships of child care work with other housework tasks, so that the important and timeconsuming task of child care can be betterconceptualized as part of housework.Second, our analysis strongly suggests that gendered differences in social perceptions produce overreports of housework from husbandthat are sociologically important. Although wives overreport too, this is not as serious a sociological or policy problem as it is forhusbands. In a historical context in which women have reduced dramatically their contributions to unpaid domestic labor in the househunderestimating wives' overreports, and consequently overestimating their housework contributions, does not radically affect thesubstantive conclusions researchers reach about wives' changing contributions to the domestic division of labor. For husbands, howevethe overreport we document is large enough to cast serious doubt on the conclusion that husbands have increased their supply of domelabor to the household in the past 25 years.While evidence from longitudinal research about the size and nature of husbands' increased housework contributions is mixed (Covermand Sheley 1986; Gershuny and Robinson 1988), and the increases in husbands' housework contributions claimed for cross-sectionalstudies are small, not very robust, and often not statistically significant, some researchers have nonetheless argued that a convergence ogender roles may be in the making (Gershuny and Robinson 1988; Pleck 1985; Stafford 1980; Stein 1984). Reports in the popular med


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of survey findings that husbands are contributing more time and attention to housework also declare a revolution in family roles. All thhighlights the politicized nature of issues surrounding gender and housework in contemporary American culture. It also raises a questioin the sociology of knowledge about why housework analysts so fervently wish to find an increase in husbands ' housework contributioWhatever the answer to this question, the huge interest in husbands' increasing housework and the politicization surrounding the purpogender revolution in the domestic division of labor lend weight to our argument that widespread changes in social expectations abouthusbands' domestic roles are affecting how husbands report their housework behavior. We are not suggesting that husbands are lying.They may believe they are doing more housework. Or perhaps changing social expectations make husbands feel as though they shoulddoing more, or may focus their attention on what little they do, leading to an overreport in the survey interview context. We cannotdistinguish among these explanations with our data. What we have shown, however, is that husbands overreport their houseworkcontributions in the direct-question survey context. And this overreport may underpin conclusions that husbands have increased their

housework contributions in recent years. Given the size of the overreports that we document then, and in light of the finding thatoverreporting is structured very differently for wives and husbands, we contend that there is little basis on which to conclude that a chain husbands' contributions to family workhas actually occurred. Rather, our analysis reveals that wives still perform the bulk ofhousework in U.S. marriages and that most husbands do no housework, or only a few hours a week. Indeed, there is no evidence, once overreport we have identified is taken into account, that husbands are doing any more housework than their predecessors who wereinterviewed by social scientists more than a quarter of a century ago.[Footnote]

NOTES

[Footnote]

1. There is also evidence of spousal inconsistency within surveys (Fenstermaker Berk and Shih 1980; Warner 1986), but this falls outsithe scope of the present study, which is limited to reporting differences between surveys for a sample of individual married women andmen.2. Fenstermaker Berk and Shih's (1980) important study accounted for the spousal inconsistency surrounding husbands' houseworkcontributions by arguing that since wives participate in a wider variety of household tasks and do much more housework on average thhusbands, "they may be forced to override more traditional stereotypes in their accounts of their own and their husbands' participation wives may be less vulnerable to normative assumptions and more likely compelled to describe their actual work lives" (Fenstermaker Band Shih 1980, 206; also see Warner 1986). Although these arguments were developed in the context of spousal studies, the reasoning applicable to gender comparisons across survey contexts where we do not have comparable information on spouses.

[Footnote]

3. Note that our data consist of married individuals rather than matched married couples since the Americans ' Use of Time, 1985 (AUT(Robinson 1985a) did not survey actual spouses in its third round. This is true of many housework surveys and is problematic for studiof the domestic division of labor where one unit of analysis must be the couple that negotiates who does what housework.4. Three outliers from the National Survey of Families and Households (NSFH) (Bumpass and Sweet 1985; Sweet, Bumpass, and Call1988) and one from the AUT were also excluded from the following analyses, because in the two-sample context the disposition of theregression surface is particularly sensitive to extreme values. Two of these outliers were also greater than the number of hours in a wee

which is well beyond the range of time possible for performing housework in a week.5. The result of using data on more infrequently performed tasks would have been to either badly overestimate or underestimate thereporting gap. For example, respondents would be self-reporting a "typical" amount of car repair in the NSFH context, but in the time-diary context they would record either that they did 0 or that they did 8 hours of car repair that day. In either case, such extreme estimaare not comparable with the weekly estimates provided in the self-reported summary data. This problem is avoided in part by limiting ostudy to the four most frequently performed household tasks, since the day of the week a respondent was surveyed would not likely biaaggregated estimates of weekly housework contributions.

[Footnote]

6. As a further check, we factor-analyzed all the housework items in both data sets and found that these four female-typed tasks loadedtogether.7. For the first part of the Heckman correction, we ran a probit analysis on all the observations to model the probability that a respondereports zero housework versus the chance that she or he reports some housework each week. The predicted probability values from the

probit equation represent a random, standard normal variable. These probability values, denoted z below, are then used to compute

[Footnote]

a hazard rate for each respondent that represents the instantaneous probability of reporting zero housework, conditional on being in thepool at risk (Berl 1983; Tuma 1982, 8-10). The hazard rate, calculated with the following equation for each observation, is treated as asubstantive variable in the ordinary least squares (OLS) analysis that followed.

[Footnote]

Hazard Rat = f(zi) / [i - F(zi)],

[Footnote]

where f(z,) is the probability density function and F(z;) is the cumulative distribution function for the ith respondent. For the second pathe Heckman correction, we exclude those who reported zero hours and model housework behavior on the remaining respondents. In th


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linear OLS model, the dependent variable is continuous rather than binary and the model includes a variable for the hazard rate in additto the other explanatory variables.Note at this point that although zero reporters have ben excluded, linear regression still predicts some negative values since it is based othe assumption of a normally distributed dependent variable. The Heckman correction does not eliminate this possibility. Therefore, sinnegative housework is not a meaningful outcome, we set to zero the negative housework predictions produced by our OLS regression.This decision is supported by the results of a probit analysis we performed on the NSFH sample that modeled the probability of reportizero hous:work; all of those respondents with negative predicted housework in our linear regression were also predicted by the probitmodel to be more likely than not to have self-reported zero housework hours.

[Footnote]

Also note that negative housework is only conceivable as work (or mess) creation, which may be relevant to theories of the domesticdivision of labor but which makes little sense in a study that looks at individual reporting differences between survey contexts.8. Typically, in a standard Heckman correction, the problem is sample selection bias. That is, some group or portion of the distributionmissing for a substantive reason. For example, high school dropouts are missing from a sample of college graduates. A Heckmanprocedure could be used first to predict who drops out of high school. We have no reason, however, to think this type of bias is true forpopulation reporting zero hours of housework in either the AUT or the NSFH. Zero is simply a value of housework available to report;these respondents are not actually missing. Thus, ours is not a true selection bias problem.9. To focus on valid percentages for the cross-sample comparison, we have limited the presentation to nonmissing data. In the AUT, thwere no missing data on housework hours. In the NSFH, there were 19.8 percent missing cases out of 6,779 on housework hours. Bygender, this breaks down to 26.2 percent missing for husbands and 14.4 percent missing for wives.10. The overall shift in husbands' unpaid labor supply to the household is composed of 2.34 more hours in housework and 0.29 fewerhours in child care per week, on average. All estimates are calculated from Gershuny and Robinson's data presentation, Figures 4 and 5(1988, 54748). This finding is net of compositional change in the population over time.

[Footnote]

11. Indeed, the raw correlations between the reporting gap, the total amount of predicted housework a respondent performs, and genderalso very high, reinforcing our decision to break down our analysis by gender.12. The predictions in Figure 2 are made for levels of total housework that fall within a 95% confidence interval around the mean for egender.13. The mean socioeconomic index (SEI) is actually higher for the traditional group, but it also has a much larger variance for this grouBoth income and education in Table 8 describe the phenomenon that Hochschild articulates in her book.14. The inclusion of interaction variables composed jointly of categories drawn from other predictors in the equation may introduceproblems with multicollinearity. This problem is particularly acute when using multiplicative interaction terms (Jaccard, Turrisi, and W1990). Our interaction terms are categorical, however, with the highest correlation between the interaction terms and predictors onlyreaching .58.15. Although the inclusion of the "Hochschild dummies" for husbands produces significant t statistics for the added coefficients, these not adequate to assess the statistical significance of the

[Footnote]

model. Rather, testing for a significant increment in R-square is more appropriate (Jaccard, Turrisi, and Wan 1990). When that is done,Hochschild dummies (and the "supermom" dummy for wives in model 2) are all found to be statistically significant at the .OS level.16. The R-squares for our models of the overreport are low. However, we believe it is worth presenting these models to explicate whatconceptualize as the underlying causal model producing overreports.

[Reference]

REFERENCES

[Reference]

Berk, Richard A. 1983. An introduction to sample selection bias in sociological data. American Sociological Review 48 (3): 386-98.Bianchi, Suzanne M., and Daphne Spain.1986. American women in transition. New York: Russell Sage

Foundation.Bumpass, Larry, and James Sweet. 1985. The National Survey of Families and Households. Madison: University of Wisconsin-MadisoCenter for Demography and Ecology. Coverman, Shelley W.1983. Gender, domestic labor time, and wage inequality. AmericanSociological Review 48:623-37..1989. Women's work is never done: The division of domestic labor. In Women: A feminist perspective, 4th ed., edited by Jo FreemanMountain View, CA: Mayfield. Coverman, Shelley W., and Joseph E Sheley. 1986. Change in men's housework and child-care time,1965-1975. American Sociological Review 48:413-22.

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Davis, Margaret R. 1983. Families in a working world: The impact of organizations on domestic life. New York: Praeger.Fenstermaker Berk, Sarah, and Anthony Shih. 1980. Contributions to household labor: Comparing wives' and husbands' reports. InWomen and household labor, edited by Sarah Fenstermaker Berk. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.Gershuny, Jonathan, and John P Robinson. 1988. Historical changes in the household division of labor.


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Demography 25 (4): 537-52.Granbois, Donald H., and Ronald P. Willett. 1970. Equivalence of family role measures based on husband and wife data. Journal ofMarriage and the Family 32 (1): 68-72. Heckman, James J. 1976. The common structure of statistical models of truncation, sampleselection and limited dependent variables and a simple estimator for such models. Annals of Economic and Social Measurement 5:475

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Hill, M. 1985. Patterns of time use. In Time, goods and well-being, edited by E T. Juster and E P Stafford. Ann Arbor, MI: Institute forSocial Science Research.Hochschild, Arlie, with Anne Machung. 1989. The second shift: Working parents and the revolution at

home. New York: Viking.Jaccard, James, Robert Turrisi, and Choi K. Wan. 1990. Interaction effects in multiple regression. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.Juster, E Thomas, and E P. Stafford. 1991. Comment. Public Opinion Quarterly 55 (3): 347-56.1985. Time, goods, and well-being. Ann Arbor, MI: Institute for Social Research. Lennon, Mary Clare, and Sarah Rosenfield. 1994.Relative fairness and the division of housework: The importance of options. American Journal of Sociology 100 (2): 506-31.

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Maddala, G. S. 1983. Limited dependent and qualitative variables in econometrics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Marini, Margaret Mooney, and Beth Anne Shelton. 1993. Measuring household work: Recent experiencein the United States. Social Science Research 22 (4): 3Ii1-82. Pleck, Joseph H. 1985. Working wives/Working husbands. ]Beverly HillCA: Sage. Robinson, John P. 1977. How Americans use time: A social psychological analysis of everyday behavior. New York: Praeg

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. 1980. Housework technology and household work. In Women and household labor, edited by S. F Berk. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.1985a. Americans' use of time, 1985 computer,file. College Park: University of Maryland, Survey Research Center (producer, 1992). AArbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (distributor, 1993).1985b. The validity and reliability of diaries versus alternative time use measures. In Time, goods, and well-being, edited by E T. Justeand E P. Stafford. Ann Arbor, MI: Institute for Social Research.1988. Who's doing the housework? American Demographics 10:24-28, 63.

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Sapiro, Virginia.1991. Feminism: A generation later. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences 514:10-22.Scheuch, Erwin K. 1972. The time budget interview. In The use of time: Daily activities of urban and suburban populations in twelvecountries, edited by Alexander Szalai. The Hague, the Netherlands: Mouton.Simon, Rita J., and Jean M. Landis. 1989. The polls-a report: Women's and men's attitudes about awoman's place and role. Public Opinion Quarterly 55;:265-77. Stafford, Frank P. 1980. Women's use of time converging with men's.Monthly Labor Review 103 (December): 57-59.

Stein, Peter. 1984. Men in families. Marriage and Family Review 7 (fall/winter): 143-62. Sweet, James, larry Bumpass, and Vaughn C1988. The design and content of the National Survey

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of Families and Households. Working Paper NSH-lr Center for Demography and Ecology, University of Wisconsin-Madison.Szalai, Alexander. 1966. The multinational comparative time budget research project. AmericanBehavioral Scientist 9:1-20.Tuma, Nancy B. 1982. Nonparametric and partially parametric approaches to event-history analysis. In Sociological Methodology, ediby Samuel Leinhatdt. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. U.S. Census Bureau. 1960. Historical statistics of the U.S. Washington, DC: GPO.1970. 1970 census of population: Occupational characteristics. PC(2)-7A. Washington, DC: GPO.

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U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics. 1991. Working women: A chartbook. Bulletin 2385. Washington, DC: GPO.

-1993. Employment and earnings 41 (1). Washington, DC: GPO. Walker, Kathryn. 1968. Homemaking still takes time. Journal of HomEconomics 61:621-27. Warner, Rebecca L. 1986. Alternative strategies for measuring household diviion of labor. Journal ofFamily Issues 7 (2): 179-95.Warrick, Pamela. 1994. Meet the masters of the new universe. The Los Angeles Times, 18 November.

[Author note]

JULIE E. PRESSUniversity of California at Los Angeles ELEANOR TOWNSLEY Mount Holyoke College

[Author note]

AUTHORS' NOTE: We owe a debt of gratitude to several people who read drafts, gave comments, and/or helped us with statisticalmethods: Simon Potter, Richard Berk, Eva Fodor, Ronald Jacobs, Michael Lichter, David McFarlan& Matthew McKeever, SusanMarkens, Ruth Milkman, Daryl Press, S. James Press, Ellen Reese, Laura Sanchez, Judith Tan rr, and Donald Treiman, as well as seve


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anonymous reviewers. All errors in substance and judgment remain those of the authors. We also wish to thank the Ford Foundation fothe generous funds to the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) that supported this research (grant no. 910-0262j`).REPRINT REQUESTS: Julie E. Press, Department of Sociology, University of California at Los Angeles, Box 95155, Los Angeles, C90095; e-mail: jpress@ucla edu.

[Author note]

Julie E. Press is a doctoral candidate in sociology at the University of California Los Angeles and a graduate research fellow at the UCCenter for the Study of Urban Poverty. Her research program addresses gender, race, and class inequality in paid and unpaid work, andrelationship between the two.Eleanor Townsley is an assistant professor of sociology at Mount Holyoke College. Her research interests include the sociology of

intellectuals, measurement, the state and the relationship between gender, work, and power. Her work has been published in Theory anSociety, New Left Review, and the Handbook of Economic Sociology.

gender, class, and social desirability

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