Unequal homes, unequal wellbeing

Abstract

Unequal household work division (HWD) can lead to lesser wellbeing. Because of traditional gender norms, it is expected for the female to focus on household tasks, meaning that most ‘victims’ of HWD are female. However, the exact relationship between HWD and wellbeing is rather understudied. Various literary works suggest this relationship could be explained via relationship satisfaction. This study examined this relationship by performing a cross-sectional analysis on existing data from the LISS panel. This data consisted of 995 participants, with a relative equal division between female (531) and male (464). Subsequently a mediation analysis was performed for relationship satisfaction and the control variable age, education, and traditional gender norms. After the analysis there was no significant effect found for relationship satisfaction as mediator. This could be because of the origin of the data, the time of the data or even because another variable might be influencing the effect. There were however significant associations found for HWD, relationship satisfaction, age, and education on wellbeing, for women. Compared to men, these results are almost the same, with HWD only being significant for women, while traditional gender norms are significant for men. The conclusion that can be drawn from this is that the relationship between HWD and wellbeing needs to be studied further, longer over time, and with primary qualitative data so that the operationalization of the variables can be done beforehand. This future research should take gender differences into account, especially HWD and traditional gender norms, as these are the main differentiators between women and men.