Closing The Gender Pay Gap, One Household Chore At A Time: How Transparency Reduces Domestic Free Riding and Work-Family Conflict Among Dual Earner Couples

Authors:

Abstract: Because gendered labor at home impacts women’s outcomes at work, a more egalitarian division of domestic labor is key to addressing today’s gender pay gap. Drawing from cross-disciplinary literature on social dilemmas, we reframe female workers’ disproportionate contribution to domestic labor as a free rider problem and use this theoretical lens to devise a novel intervention to increase egalitarian division of labor in dual earner households. In a two-week, time-use intervention study with 82 dual earner heterosexual couples (N = 2,137 daily observations), making individual contributions at home more transparent reduced gendered division of domestic labor by half, boosted spousal support, and curbed home interferences with work duties for both partners. Contrasting with prior interventions focusing on employer-based social support, our theory and findings show that nudges to increase spousal support and egalitarian division of domestic labor can prove effective in alleviating disparities in home demands that hinder women’s careers.

Track: DEI

Keywords: gender equality, work-family conflict, social support, dyadic cooperation, division of domestic labor