Sex-Typed Chores and the City: Gender,Urbanicity,and Housework

Abstract

How does place structure the gendered division of household labor? Because people’s living spaces and lifestyles differ dramatically across urban, suburban, and rural areas, it follows that time spent on household chores may vary across places. In cities, for example, many households do not have vehicles or lawns, and housing units tend to be relatively small. Urban men’s and women’s time use therefore provides insight into how partners contribute to household chores when there is less structural demand for the types of tasks they typically do. We examine these dynamics using data on heterosexual married individuals from the American Time Use Survey combined with the Current Population Survey. We find that urban men spend relatively little time on male-typed chores, but they spend the same amount of time on female-typed chores as their suburban and rural counterparts. This pattern suggests that urban men do not “step up” their involvement in female-typed tasks even though they contribute little in the way of other housework. In contrast, urbanicity rarely predicts women’s time use, implying that women spend considerable time on household chores regardless of where they live. Implications for research on gender and housework are discussed.

Keywords

housework urbanicity place time use gender

One of the most persistent findings in the housework literature is that chores are sex-typed. In other words, in heterosexual married couples, women take primary responsibility for some chores while men take primary responsibility for other chores. Although the exact tasks men and women do vary across couples, most studies consider “female-typed” chores to include cooking, doing dishes, cleaning, laundry, and grocery shopping, and “male-typed” chores to include auto maintenance, making repairs, and outdoor chores (Bianchi et al. 2000, 2012; Bianchi, Robinson, and Milkie 2006; Greenstein 2000; Kroska 2004; Schneider 2012; South and Spitze 1994; Thébaud 2010; West and Zimmerman 1987).

Previous research acknowledges that female- and male-typed chores are attached to different schedules that dictate people’s time spent on these tasks. Studies show, for example, that female-typed chores are more routine than male-typed chores. Most female-typed chores must be performed daily or weekly, while male-typed chores are more irregular, thus contributing to gender differences in time spent on housework (Hochschild and Machung 1989). Despite this acknowledgement, virtually no research has considered how place is related to time spent on certain tasks. Urbanicity is an important factor because it structures people’s lifestyles and places special constraints on housework. People who live in cities often do not have vehicles or lawns, for example, suggesting that urban residents may rarely do male-typed chores. Time spent on cleaning and other female-typed tasks also may be reduced in cities because housing units tend to be smaller than those in suburban and rural areas. For these reasons, the types and amounts of housework partners do may vary dramatically by urbanicity.

In this article, we interrogate the role of urbanicity in time spent on sex-typed housework. We posit that urbanicity structures the types and amounts of chores partners do, and that an urban lifestyle places unique constraints on both male- and female-typed chores. Time use in urban areas, therefore, provides a unique window into how men and women contribute to household chores when there is less structural demand for the chores they typically do. For men, one possibility is that they spend additional time on female-typed housework to ensure they are contributing to household chores. Another possibility is that urban men spend no more time on female-typed chores than their suburban or rural counterparts—implying that the gendered division of household chores, as well as the social-interactional mechanisms driving this division, are extremely durable. For women, on the other hand, the extent to which they do (or do not) adjust their time spent on female-typed chores also reflects the durability of gendered expectations for housework. In light of these empirical puzzles, we contend that urbanicity is a key factor in the gendered division of household labor that has been overlooked in prior research. More broadly, examining the effects of urbanicity on household labor provides a window into the intersection of place and gender in shaping people’s lives.

We examine these dynamics using data from the 2003 to 2016 waves of the American Time Use Survey (ATUS), a nationally representative study conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The ATUS is the most comprehensive national study that includes data on people’s time spent on a range of sex-typed chores, as well as their urbanicity. We leverage these data to assess how place structures housework in the United States.

Gender, Housework, and the Role of Urbanicity

Research consistently shows that chores are sex-typed among heterosexual married couples. Female-typed tasks are broadly understood to include core housework tasks often measured in national surveys, such as cooking and cleaning up after meals, cleaning the house, laundry, and grocery shopping. In heterosexual couples with children, women spend a particularly large amount of time on these tasks because cooking and cleaning increases exponentially with children (Baxter, Hewitt, and Haynes 2008; Craig 2006; Damaske 2011; Robinson and Milkie 1998). Male-typed chores include automobile maintenance, household repairs, and outdoor chores such as mowing the lawn (Bianchi, Robinson, and Milkie 2006; Schneider 2012).

Past research demonstrates that chores are differentially anchored in time. Female-typed chores are considered routine in the sense that they must be performed daily or weekly, but male-typed chores are less regular (Hochschild and Machung 1989). This disparity is partly due to gendered expectations for housekeeping. Because wives are held to high standards for household cleanliness, women are viewed as socially obligated to clean and do dishes and laundry with some frequency (Poortman and Van Der Lippe 2009; Robinson and Milkie 1998). But female-typed chores are also inherently regular, as meals must be prepared most days (Barnett and Shen 1997). Male-typed chores, in contrast, are needed only sometimes, and partners can go multiple days without making repairs or doing outdoor chores. Partly as a consequence of the different schedules attached to sex-typed chores, women spend considerably more time on housework than men (Bianchi, Robinson, and Milkie 2006).

Although studies have examined how the rhythms of everyday life predict time spent on sex-typed tasks, virtually no research has assessed the role of place in this process. This omission is surprising, considering the importance of place within sociology, and the reality that place is a key factor in social interaction and the creation and maintenance of inequality (Gieryn 2000). Where people live—and the lifestyles associated those locations—can have a profound effect on how they spend time and maintain their households. In this article, we focus on urbanicity as a determinant of sex-typed housework because it both enables and constrains time spent on chores.

Urbanicity and Men’s Time Spent on Housework

Although most research has not theorized chores as place-dependent, we posit that partners spend more or less time on tasks depending on where they live. In particular, we conceptualize male-typed chores as strongly related to place, for two main reasons. First, urbanicity places structural constraints on male-typed housework. Households in urban areas are less likely to have automobiles and outdoor spaces, which are needed for partners to spend time on automobile repairs and outdoor chores (two of the three core male-typed chores). Only nine percent of households in the United States do not have a vehicle, but this figure is above 30 percent in major cities such as New York and Boston (Sivak 2014). Data on outdoor spaces are harder to come by, but many city planners specialize in urban open spaces in part because urban households do not have lawns of their own (Marcus and Francis 1998). Some urban households have patios or even small lawns, but the time needed to maintain these spaces is considerably less than what is needed to landscape a typical rural or suburban lawn.¹ This evidence suggests that urban households have relatively little demand for male-typed housework.

Second, men who enjoy activities categorized as male-typed chores may systematically elect to live in rural or suburban areas—in other words, there may be a selection effect of urbanicity. Although outdoor chores and automobile and household repairs are usually characterized as housework, some men think of these tasks as hobbies and may gravitate toward living in areas that are better suited for these activities. An extreme example would be men who fit the mold of Connell’s (1993) “frontier masculinity,” which has been described as “a form of masculinity built on the myths of the frontier, including the iconic Daniel Boone, cowboys, and Paul Bunyan” (Anahita and Mix 2006, 333). These men would prefer not to live in cities but would instead elect to live in rural or suburban areas where they have the space and other freedoms to do activities they enjoy. These selection effects ultimately reflect the idea that ideal types of masculinity vary by urbanicity, and rural masculinity promotes male-typed chores more so than urban masculinity.

In light of this evidence, we expect time spent on male-typed chores to be lower in urban areas than suburban or rural areas. Further, because husbands in heterosexual married couples usually take primary responsibility for male-typed chores, we expect these variations in time use to be concentrated among men. This leads to our first hypothesis:

Hypothesis 1: Men spend less time on male-typed chores in urban areas than in suburban or rural areas.

Although we view automobile repairs and outdoor chores as structurally constrained in cities, this argument does not apply to a final male-typed task: making home repairs. Urbanicity may not directly affect men’s time spent on home repairs—because urbanicity does not determine how often things break around the house and need to be repaired—but it is also important to consider factors that could affect men’s time use indirectly. Accordingly, we theorize homeownership as a factor that indirectly affects the relationship between urbanicity and men’s time spent on male-typed chores. Whereas homeowners must make their own home repairs (or hire someone else to do the repairs), most renters can rely on maintenance staff to make repairs for them. Homeowners, therefore, may spend more time on male-typed chores than renters because they have more responsibility for maintaining their homes. What is more, homeownership rates are relatively low in cities. The U.S. Census estimates that about 80 percent of housing units are owner-occupied in rural areas, versus about 60 percent in urban areas, and this primarily is due to factors such as lower cost of housing in rural areas (Mazur 2016). In sum, we expect homeownership to account for some, but not all, of the effect of urbanicity on men’s time spent on male-typed housework, as we expect structural constraints and selection effects to matter even after accounting for homeownership.

Hypothesis 2: Part of the relationship between urbanicity and men’s time spent on male-typed housework is due to lower homeownership rates in urban areas.

The previous sections suggest that men’s time spent on male-typed chores is distinctly different in urban areas than suburban or rural areas. But this pattern raises an important question: If urban men spend relatively little time on male-typed chores, what does their time spent on female-typed chores look like? And, more broadly, what does this suggest about the gendered division of household labor? Previous research suggests two main ways this relationship could unfold.

The first possibility is that men who live in urban areas spend more time on female-typed chores. This pattern would imply that urban men “step up” their female-typed chores in order to compensate for their lack of male-typed chores—presumably because they have time available, and because they have the will to contribute to household chores. Prior research demonstrates that urban residents are more progressive than suburban or rural residents (Carter and Carter 2014; Hamilton, Geist, and Powell 2011). Social attitudes, in turn, have been shown to be related to housework, such that progressive individuals tend to have a more egalitarian division of household labor than those with more traditional views (Davis and Greenstein 2009; Greenstein 1996). This pattern suggests that if urban men are structurally limited in their ability to spend time on male-typed chores, they will spend additional time on female-typed chores to equalize housework with their wives. If this is the case, then the gendered division of housework may erode in situations where men are structurally unable to spend time on male-typed housework. In other words, if opportunities for male-typed housework do not exist, then female-typed housework may be viewed more as couples’ collective responsibility than as strictly women’s domain. This leads us to the following hypothesis:

Hypothesis 3: Men spend more time on female-typed chores when they live in urban areas than when they live in suburban or rural areas.

Other research implies a null effect of urbanicity on men’s time spent on female-typed chores (i.e., we would fail to reject the null for Hypothesis 3). In other words, despite structural factors that prevent them from spending time on male-typed chores, urban men spend no more time on female-typed chores than those who live elsewhere. According to “doing gender” theories of housework, men and women do different types of chores because this conforms to expectations for gendered behavior. Men, for example, do male-typed chores because they are aligned with traditional notions of masculinity, but they may resist doing female-typed chores because they are seen as feminine (Coverman 1985; Greenstein 1996; South and Spitze 1994; West and Zimmerman 1987). These studies suggest that urban men may avoid doing female-typed chores—even when they otherwise spend little time on housework—because female-typed chores are “women’s work.” This pattern would imply that the gendered expectations associated with housework are extremely durable, to the point that, compared to non-urban men, urban men do not contribute to female-typed housework despite greater time availability and, presumably, gender egalitarian attitudes. In this scenario, female-typed chores continue to be viewed as female-typed despite many reasons for them to be viewed as shared tasks.

Urbanicity and Women’s Time Spent on Housework

Some studies suggest that women’s time spent on housework, similar to men’s, shifts depending on their urbanicity. Here we focus on women’s time spent on female-typed chores because women generally spend little time on male-typed chores (Bianchi et al. 2000; Bianchi, Robinson, and Milkie 2006), although male-typed chores are included in the analyses. Research on bargaining implies that if urban men are structurally constrained in their ability to spend time on male-typed chores, then urban women will adjust their housework downward to be more in line with their partners (Bittman et al. 2003). Female-typed chores also may be structurally constrained in cities because housing units tend to be relatively small. Because time spent cleaning is at least partly correlated with the size of the living area, it follows that urban women’s time spent cleaning (and, therefore, time spent on female-typed housework) would be lower than that for rural or suburban women. The structure of urban life might also lead urban women to spend less time cooking, doing dishes, and grocery shopping if they eat most of their meals outside the home, but this dynamic is very much entwined with social class—an issue we consider further in the results. This leads to the following hypothesis:

Hypothesis 4: Women spend less time on female-typed chores in urban areas than suburban or rural areas.

While some research suggests that women’s time use varies by urbanicity, another scenario is that women spend approximately equal time on housework across urban, suburban, and rural areas (i.e., we would fail to reject the null for Hypothesis 4). As noted above, female-typed chores are more firmly anchored in time than male-typed chores—so regardless of where households are located (with the exception of those who outsource chores), partners must prepare and clean up after meals, do laundry, clean, and shop for groceries regularly. “Doing gender” theories of housework also imply that urbanicity would not predict women’s time spent on housework because chores are a key way that women, regardless of where they live, conform to gendered expectations. If this is the case, then this provides further evidence for the durability of the gendered division of housework. Urban women, by many accounts, have little reason to spend time on housework—their housing units are small, they have many opportunities to outsource chores, and their husbands’ time spent on male-typed chores is effectively constrained. Yet, despite all these factors, urban women may spend ample time on housework because the gendered link between femininity and housework ultimately transcends place.

Methods

We use data from the 2003 to 2016 waves of the American Time Use Survey (ATUS), a nationally representative, repeated cross-sectional study conducted by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. ATUS respondents are recruited from a subset of households in the outgoing rotation group of the Current Population Survey (CPS). The ATUS is considered the “gold standard” in time use research because of the accuracy of the time diary method (for studies using the data set, see Bianchi et al. 2012; Bianchi, Robinson, and Milkie 2006; Burgard and Ailshire 2013; Raley, Bianchi, and Wang 2012; Schneider 2012). The time diary portion of the survey consists of respondents “walking” telephone interviewers through their main activities over a randomly selected 24-hour period. Each entry in the time diary is later categorized using a coding scheme containing hundreds of activities. The ATUS, as a result, is among the only national surveys that captures time spent on the full range of male- and female-typed chores. We also incorporated several demographic items from the CPS, including race, education, homeownership, and hours worked per week. These items were collected two to five months before the ATUS interviews, but we have little reason to suspect these stable characteristics would have changed much between surveys.

We considered using other data sets, but none were as comprehensive as the ATUS/CPS. The National Survey of Families and Households (NSFH), for example, includes housework measures for both members of the respondent couples as well as measures of gender ideology, but it does not contain data on urbanicity. Similarly, the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) Family and Changing Gender Roles module includes measures of gender ideology, but it incorporates only one male-typed chore (i.e., making repairs). The ATUS, to our knowledge, is the only data set with sufficient measures to conduct this study.

We limited our sample to heterosexual married respondents in couples with at least one spouse who works for pay.² We further restricted the sample to respondents living in households with only one other adult (with or without children) and with complete data for all covariates, bringing the final sample to 22,040.³ The sample was constructed using the ATUS Extract Builder database (ATUS-X), a project of the Maryland Population Research Center and Minnesota Population Center that links the ATUS and CPS and facilitates the construction of time use variables (Hofferth, Flood, and Sobek 2015).

The dependent variables capture the number of minutes spent on male- and female-typed housework per day. We categorized chores as “male-typed” or “female-typed” consistent with past research on gendered housework (Bianchi, Robinson, and Milkie 2006; Schneider 2012; South and Spitze 1994). Male-typed chores include auto maintenance, making repairs, and outdoor chores, while female-typed chores include cooking, doing dishes, cleaning, laundry, and grocery shopping.^4,5 We top-coded each of these items at the 95th percentile to minimize skew and summed them to create our measures of sex-typed housework. In an exception, we top-coded auto maintenance at the 99th percentile because the mean was exceptionally low. Although our analyses focus on household chores, we conducted supplementary analyses using care work as a dependent variable because it is sometimes considered alongside female-typed housework (Sayer, Bianchi, and Robinson 2004). These results are reported in notes below.

The main independent variable is urbanicity—either urban, suburban, or rural—which ATUS categorizes consistent with U.S. Census definitions. Urban residents are those who live in a core urbanized area with a population of at least 50,000. Results for those who live in large urban areas (population 5 million+) were consistent with those in other urban areas, so we combined these groups to create one “urban” measure. Suburban residents live in areas that are outside center cities but still economically and socially integrated with an urban core. Rural residents live in areas that are classified as nonmetropolitan.

We also controlled for a number of factors that may affect the relationships between gender, urbanicity, and time use. These include homeownership, age, education, race, presence of children in the household, family income, whether the respondent was enrolled in school, typical hours worked per week, spouse’s typical hours worked per week, earnings share (i.e., the proportion of household income earned by the respondent), and day of the week and year the ATUS interview took place. Our initial analyses included all controls except for homeownership, but to test Hypothesis 2, we added a control for homeownership to examine the extent to which it mediates the effects of urbanicity. Descriptive statistics are shown in Table 1.

Table 1:

Descriptive Statistics, American Time Use Survey 2003-2016, N = 22,040

	Mean/Percentage(SD)
	Rural	Suburban	Urban
Dependent variables
Time spent on male-typed chores (minutes)	12.70 (30.04)	9.65 (25.71)	6.57 (21.71)
Time spent on female-typed chores (minutes)	69.81 (79.77)	76.91 (81.92)	75.61 (82.66)
Independent variables
Gender
Man	0.44	0.43	0.42
Woman	0.56	0.57	0.58
Homeownership	0.84	0.83	0.67
Age	36.07 (7.59)	37.03 (6.92)	35.46 (7.10)
Education
Less than high school	0.06	0.05	0.09
High school	0.36	0.21	0.18
Some college	0.32	0.25	0.23
Bachelor’s degree	0.19	0.32	0.31
Master’s degree or more	0.07	0.16	0.19
Race
White	0.93	0.87	0.79
Nonwhite	0.07	0.13	0.21
Children in household (yes/no)	0.76	0.76	0.70
Family income (categories)	11.53 (2.88)	13.01 (2.75)	12.36 (3.19)
Enrolled in school	0.07	0.07	0.09
Work hours per week	34.50 (18.25)	32.07 (19.13)	31.58 (19.60)
Spouse’s work hours per week	39.07 (11.99)	39.96 (12.01)	39.50 (12.34)
Earnings share	0.39 (0.27)	0.37 (0.28)	0.36 (0.27)
n	4,215	12,353	5,472

NOTE: Sample is composed of heterosexual married individuals in couples with at least one spouse who works for pay. Descriptive statistics include survey weights.

The results are reported in three parts. We begin by focusing on men’s housework across urban, suburban, and rural areas. We use ordinary least squares (OLS) regression to estimate the relationships between urbanicity and men’s time spent on male- and female-typed chores. Because many respondents reported no time spent on chores, we considered using several types of models, including models for count outcomes with many instances of zero (e.g., zero-inflated Poisson). Results were similar across all the models we examined, so we present OLS regressions for ease of interpretation. We then turn to women’s housework and examine how urbanicity predicts women’s time spent on male- and female-typed chores. Finally, we combine these analyses to succinctly illustrate the relationship between place and housework. In addition to the primary analyses, we also discuss a set of robustness checks intended to assess the effects of social class. Because a household’s ability to outsource chores is largely a function of class, and outsourcing chores is particularly common in cities (as discussed above), the effects of urbanicity could differ by family income. These analyses are summarized at the end of the results section.

Assessing Gender, Urbanicity, and Housework

Urbanicity and Men’s Housework

We begin by assessing the relationships between urbanicity and sex-typed housework for men. Table 2 reports these results, with separate models for male- and female-typed chores. Model 1 shows that suburban and especially urban men spend less time on male-typed chores than rural men. We expected this because vehicles and outdoor spaces are prerequisites for male-typed chores, and these tend to be uncommon in cities. Men may also self-select into rural areas if they enjoy spending time on male-typed chores, which some men view as hobbies rather than housework. Both of these mechanisms suggest that time spent on male-typed chores should be negatively associated with urbanicity.

Table 2:

Effect of Urbanicity on Men’s Time Spent on Housework, N = 8,736

	Male-Typed Housework		Female-Typed Housework
	(1)	(2)	(3)	(4)
Suburban	−5.30***	−4.87***	3.13	2.96
	(1.27)	(1.27)	(1.69)	(1.69)
Urban	−7.98***	−6.71***	3.14	2.63
	(1.34)	(1.35)	(2.03)	(2.03)
Own home		7.47***		−3.04
		(0.97)		(2.09)
Age	0.35***	0.28***	−0.09	−0.07
	(0.07)	(0.07)	(0.10)	(0.10)
High school	0.52	0.09	0.81	0.99
	(2.00)	(1.98)	(3.38)	(3.40)
Some college	−1.74	−2.49	2.98	3.28
	(1.99)	(1.98)	(3.39)	(3.42)
Bachelor’s degree	−3.47	−4.25*	7.84*	8.15*
	(2.00)	(1.99)	(3.44)	(3.48)
Master’s degree or more	−6.05**	−6.62**	4.66	4.89
	(2.06)	(2.05)	(3.52)	(3.54)
Nonwhite	−4.73***	−3.93***	0.15	−0.18
	(0.90)	(0.90)	(2.08)	(2.08)
Children in household	0.12	−0.36	8.30***	8.50***
	(1.09)	(1.10)	(1.65)	(1.64)
Family income	0.56**	0.25	0.34	0.46
	(0.16)	(0.17)	(0.29)	(0.30)
Enrolled in school	−3.84**	−3.52*	−5.41	−5.54
	(1.41)	(1.40)	(2.86)	(2.87)
Hours worked	−0.11**	−0.12***	−0.69***	−0.69***
	(0.03)	(0.03)	(0.06)	(0.06)
Wife hours worked	0.01	0.01	0.26***	0.27***
	(0.03)	(0.03)	(0.04)	(0.04)
Earnings share	0.02	0.02	−0.06*	−0.06*
	(0.02)	(0.02)	(0.03)	(0.03)
Constant	16.10	17.05	63.05	62.66

NOTE: Ordinary least squares coefficients are reported. Robust standard errors are in parentheses. Analyses include survey weights and fixed effects for day of the week and year of survey. Results from mediation tests show that urbanicity significantly predicts homeownership (p < .001), and the urbanicity coefficients are significantly reduced across Models 1 and 2 (p < .001).

p < 0.05, ^**p < 0.01, ^***p < 0.001 (two-tailed tests).

We posited in Hypothesis 2 that part of the urbanicity effect for male-typed housework would be due to differences in homeownership across levels of urbanicity. Because homeownership is less common in center cities, and renters are less likely to make home repairs than homeowners, homeownership may partly explain why urban men spend little time on male-typed chores. Model 2 shows this is indeed the case. Homeownership has a significant and positive effect on male-typed housework: homeowners spend about 7.5 more minutes on male-typed chores per day than nonhomeowners. Further, although the effects of urbanicity remain significant across models 1 and 2, the coefficients decrease significantly in size (see Table 1 notes), indicating that homeownership is a partial mediator. These results show that differences in homeownership across levels of urbanicity partly account for differences in men’s time spent on male-typed housework—but other structural and cultural factors also are playing a role.

Models 3 and 4 focus on urbanicity differences (or lack thereof) in men’s time spent on female-typed housework. Model 3 shows that suburban and urban men are statistically indistinguishable from rural men in terms of their time spent on female-typed housework. Model 4 adds a control for homeownership, but this effect is not significant. Thus, even though urban men spend considerably less time on male-typed housework—and presumably have more egalitarian attitudes—than those who live elsewhere, they do not step up their contributions to female-typed housework. This pattern suggests that the gendered expectations associated with housework are quite durable, with men spending about the same amount of time on female-typed chores regardless of where they live.

These relationships become even clearer in Table 3. This table reports the amount of time men spend on male- and female-typed chores in urban, suburban, and rural areas, net of homeownership and other controls. The top section of the table focuses on male-typed chores. Consistent with our expectations, the largest point differential across places is in the area of outdoor chores. While rural men average about 10 minutes per day on outdoor chores, urban men average about 6 minutes. Urban and, to a lesser extent, suburban men also spend less time on auto maintenance and household repairs than urban men, even after controlling for homeownership.⁶

Table 3:

Men’s Time Spent on Male- and Female-Typed Chores, by Urbanicity, N = 8,736

	Rural	Suburban	Urban
Male-typed chores
Outdoor chores	9.73	6.95**	5.76***
Auto maintenance	3.38	1.86**	2.11*
Repairs	4.96	4.38	3.49*
Female-typed chores
Cooking	16.33	16.17	15.95
Dishes	3.52	3.47	3.46
Cleaning	9.26	10.55	10.24
Laundry	2.70	3.53	3.71
Grocery shopping	2.70	3.74**	3.77*

NOTE: Models include controls.

p < 0.05, ^**p < 0.01, ^***p < 0.001 (two-tailed tests; significantly different from rural).

The bottom section examines female-typed chores. Here we see that men’s time spent on female-typed chores does not vary across places, with the exception of grocery shopping. In fact, both suburban and urban men spend more time grocery shopping than rural men, perhaps because stores are more crowded in cities and suburbs. But other than grocery shopping, men’s time spent on female-typed chores is unaffected by urbanicity. Notably, men’s time spent on female-typed chores exceeds their time spent on male-typed chores. This is perhaps counterintuitive, given that most men take primary responsibility for male-typed chores, but play only a supporting role in the performance of female-typed chores. Yet this pattern is consistent with prior research and underscores that female-typed chores are much more routine and time-consuming than male-typed chores. Additionally, the sheer number of female-typed chores is greater than the number of male-typed chores in our analyses (i.e., 5 versus 3).

Urbanicity and Women’s Housework

Table 4 turns to the relationship between urbanicity and sex-typed housework for women. Models 1 and 2 focus on urbanicity differences in male-typed housework. In model 1, we find that both suburban and urban women do less male-typed housework than rural women. Once homeownership is accounted for in model 2, suburban and rural women are statistically indistinguishable from each other (implying that homeownership accounts for any rural-suburban differences in male-typed chores), but the divide between rural and urban women persists. Urban women, in other words, spend less time on male-typed housework than rural women even after accounting for differences in homeownership across levels of urbanicity. This result provides further evidence in support of the structural constraints urbanicity places on male-typed housework. Because both men and women spend less time on male-typed housework in urban areas despite different gendered expectations surrounding male-typed housework, we conclude there is something unique about living in a city that obviates the need to spend time on male-typed chores—the structural differences between urban and rural lifestyles being one plausible mechanism.

Table 4:

Effect of Urbanicity on Women’s Time Spent on Housework, N = 13,304

	Male-Typed Housework		Female-Typed Housework
	(1)	(2)	(3)	(4)
Suburban	−1.28*	−0.93	3.10	2.76
	(0.60)	(0.61)	(2.28)	(2.28)
Urban	−2.70***	−2.05**	1.32	0.68
	(0.67)	(0.69)	(2.59)	(2.62)
Own home		3.61***		−3.56
		(0.54)		(2.44)
Age	0.11***	0.07*	0.93***	0.97***
	(0.03)	(0.03)	(0.13)	(0.13)
High school	1.97*	1.60	−25.72***	−25.36***
	(0.91)	(0.91)	(4.42)	(4.43)
Some college	0.84	0.41	−32.03***	−31.61***
	(0.88)	(0.88)	(4.33)	(4.35)
Bachelor’s degree	0.82	0.34	−34.27***	−33.80***
	(0.91)	(0.91)	(4.38)	(4.40)
Master’s degree or more	−0.28	−0.63	−31.25***	−30.91***
	(0.97)	(0.97)	(4.70)	(4.70)
Nonwhite	−2.39***	−2.03***	2.41	2.05
	(0.48)	(0.47)	(2.38)	(2.40)
Children in household	−1.34*	−1.60*	26.27***	26.53***
	(0.64)	(0.65)	(2.19)	(2.19)
Family income	0.24**	0.08	−1.48***	−1.32**
	(0.08)	(0.08)	(0.37)	(0.38)
Enrolled in school	−0.25	−0.30	−17.03***	−16.98***
	(1.00)	(0.99)	(3.24)	(3.24)
Hours worked	−0.06***	−0.07***	−1.33***	−1.33***
	(0.02)	(0.02)	(0.07)	(0.07)
Husband hours worked	0.03	0.02	0.11	0.12
	(0.02)	(0.02)	(0.09)	(0.09)
Earnings share	−0.02	−0.02	−0.09	−0.09
	(0.01)	(0.01)	(0.05)	(0.05)
Constant	5.32	6.24	137.37	136.47

NOTE: Ordinary least squares coefficients are reported. Robust standard errors are in parentheses. Analyses include survey weights and fixed effects for day of the week and year of survey.

p < 0.05, ^**p < 0.01, ^***p < 0.001 (two-tailed tests).

Models 3 and 4 examine time spent on female-typed housework. In Hypothesis 4, we predicted that women spend little time on female-typed housework in cities, primarily because housing units are small and can be cleaned relatively quickly. Contrary to this hypothesis, however, model 3 shows that urbanicity does not predict time spent on female-typed housework—nor is urbanicity a significant predictor after controlling for homeownership in model 4. We therefore conclude that women devote approximately equal time to female-typed chores irrespective of their urbanicity and net of homeownership and other demographics. This finding suggests that gendered bargaining over housework takes a similar form for rural, suburban, and urban households, despite major structural differences across places. It is entirely plausible, for example, that because urban men do little male-typed housework, urban women do relatively little female-typed housework to equalize the division of labor. Urban women might also opt out of female-typed housework because they have many opportunities to outsource these chores, either by hiring someone to clean the house or eating out. But to the contrary, these results show that married women’s housework time stays constant even as men’s time spent on male-typed chores decreases.

Table 5 assesses the extent to which these patterns are driven by individual chores. The top section shows women’s time spent on male-typed chores in rural, suburban, and urban households. Earlier we found that women spend significantly less time on male-typed chores in urban households than rural households. Here we see this result is driven by outdoor chores, which is consistent with our argument that smaller outdoor spaces in urban areas require relatively little upkeep. The bottom section reveals two urbanicity differences in female-typed chores; namely, urban women spend less time than rural women doing dishes, and suburban women spend more time than rural women doing laundry. But because women’s overall time spent on female-typed chores does not differ statistically across levels of urbanicity, these differences in individual female-typed chores may not be substantively meaningful.

Table 5:

Women’s Time Spent on Male- and Female-Typed Chores, by Urbanicity, N = 13,304

	Rural	Suburban	Urban
Male-typed chores
Outdoor chores	4.44	3.62	2.78**
Auto maintenance	0.64	0.40	0.56
Repairs	2.19	2.32	1.88
Female-typed chores
Cooking	38.01	38.56	38.93
Dishes	11.31	11.51	10.34*
Cleaning	31.03	30.99	31.23
Laundry	14.21	15.72*	14.96
Grocery shopping	7.77	8.30	7.55

NOTE: Models include controls.

p < 0.05, ^**p < 0.01 (two-tailed tests; significantly different from rural).

Comparing Men’s and Women’s Housework

To summarize these results and put them in context, we turn to Figure 1, which provides estimates of the number of minutes (net of covariates) spent on male- and female-typed housework. The top panel shows that men’s time spent on male-typed housework decreases sharply as they live in increasingly urban locales. Urban men spend a little more than half as much time on male-typed chores as their rural counterparts, presumably because of a combination of structural and cultural differences. Additionally, urban women spend significantly less time on male-typed housework than rural women. Although women spend very little time on these tasks on average, urbanicity is an important factor that further constrains women’s time spent on male-typed chores, providing further evidence for our argument about structural constraints on male-typed tasks in cities.

Figure 1:

Time Spent on Male- and Female-Typed Chores, by Gender and Urbanicity

The estimates for female-typed chores in the bottom panel reiterate the gendered division of housework demonstrated in past research. When taking into account time spent cooking, doing dishes, cleaning, doing laundry, and grocery shopping, women average more than 100 minutes per day—largely a function of women’s greater perceived responsibility for female-typed chores, as well as the routine nature of these tasks. Men spend considerably less time on female-typed chores, or an average of slightly more than half an hour per day. Time spent on female-typed chores, further, does not vary by urbanicity for either gender, underscoring men’s limited contributions to female-typed chores even when they spend little time on male-typed chores.^7,8

Robustness Checks: Exploring the Effects of Social Class

As discussed earlier, many of the chores examined in the analyses (e.g., cooking, cleaning, grocery shopping) are entwined with social class. Higher-income individuals might outsource these chores, thus decreasing their time spent on housework. This tendency to outsource, in turn, might be especially common in cities, where there are many services available for those who would prefer to pay someone to do routine tasks for them. Although we do not have data on whether respondents outsourced chores (this is a limitation of the data set), we conducted analyses to determine the extent to which social class predicts time spent on sex-typed housework, and whether this effect varies across levels of urbanicity. We find there is indeed a class difference in the amount of female-typed housework women do. Women in the highest quartile of family income, as well as highly educated women, spend less time on these tasks than their respective counterparts. This pattern is generally consistent across places, however, suggesting that class privilege shapes urban, suburban, and rural women’s time use in a consistent manner (i.e., class-privileged urban women are not especially likely to outsource chores compared to class-privileged rural or suburban women). In a small exception, we find that lower-income rural women spend less time cooking and cleaning than lower-income suburban and urban women. But because these interactions were rarely significant, we conclude that social class is not a primary mechanism through which urbanicity shapes time spent on housework.⁹

Discussion

Typically, scholars do not think of place as a determining factor in partners’ housework contributions. But because urbanicity shapes people’s lifestyles and living spaces, and different places attract people who prefer to spend their time in different ways, it follows that urbanicity may be associated with time spent on male- and female-typed chores. Using a sample of heterosexual married adults from the American Time Use Survey (ATUS), we demonstrate that urbanicity is a significant predictor of time use—particularly men’s time spent on male-typed chores. We posit that part of the effect of urbanicity on male-typed chores is structural, as many urban households do not have vehicles and lawns, which are prerequisites for these tasks. The fact that urban women spend less time on male-typed chores than rural or suburban women lends further support to our structural constraints argument. Selection also likely plays a role, as rural areas may attract men who see male-typed tasks more as hobbies than chores. In addition, differences in homeownership rates explain part of the urbanicity effect. Although we might expect urban men to spend additional time on female-typed chores in order to make up for their lack of time spent on male-typed chores, we instead find that urban men do no more female-typed tasks than their rural or suburban counterparts (with the exception of grocery shopping).

These findings underscore the rigidity of sex-typing in household chores. Ordinarily we would have every reason to think urban men make substantial contributions to female-typed tasks. Not only do urban men spend less time on male-typed chores than those who live elsewhere (implying they have time available for female-typed chores), but also, urban men tend to be relatively progressive, and such attitudes have been shown to predict an egalitarian division of housework. Despite these factors, urban men are statistically indistinguishable from suburban and rural men in the amount of time they spend on female-typed chores.¹⁰

The most likely explanation for this pattern is that urban men resist female-typed housework because it is inherently intertwined with femininity. Because tasks such as cooking, cleaning, and laundry are considered “women’s work,” men do not spend additional time on these tasks even when they have great incentives to do so. This is not to say that men do not participate in female-typed chores—in fact, men’s average time spent on female-typed chores exceeds their average time spent on male-typed chores, perhaps because their contributions to female-typed chores follow a regular (if modest) schedule. Further, because female-typed chores account for most of partners’ time spent on housework, we find that overall housework time (i.e., male-typed housework plus female-typed housework) does not significantly differ by urbanicity. Nonetheless, urban men’s time use offers key insight into how partners respond to structural constraints on gendered housework. Even when men are perhaps most willing and able to step up in female-typed chores, these findings suggest they do not.

Given the extent to which men resist female-typed chores, these findings help clarify the mechanisms underlying gender inequality in housework. Research points to many possible reasons women spend more time on chores than men, including the notion that wives generally earn less money than their husbands and thus have less leverage in bargaining—what some refer to as “relative resources” theories of housework. Although such theories have received support in the literature (Blood and Wolfe 1960; Brines 1994; Greenstein 2000), an alternative perspective—the doing gender perspective—resonates with feminist scholars because it characterizes housework as both cultivating and reinforcing models of gender. By doing sex-typed chores, men and women enact socially defined roles associated with masculinity and femininity (West and Zimmerman 1987). This study refines the doing gender perspective by placing special emphasis on the role of abstention in doing gender through housework. Men, in other words, do gender not just by doing male-typed chores but also by declining to do female-typed chores even when male-typed chores are structurally constrained.

An additional contribution of this study is that it interrogates place as a factor in men’s and women’s time spent on housework. We demonstrate that place structures partners’ time by constraining and enabling the types of chores that must (or even can) be done in households. Although we find considerable variation in male-typed chores, female-typed chores are remarkably consistent across urban, suburban, and rural areas, even though living spaces are generally smaller in urban areas and should take less time to clean. This finding is consistent with the idea that female-typed chores are a constant and regular demand on women’s time. Regardless of where a household is located, there is always some amount of cooking, cleaning, and laundry that must be done, and in heterosexual married couples most of that responsibility falls on women. But more broadly, this finding shows that the gendered link between femininity and housework transcends place. Although urban women live in relatively small housing units, have many opportunities to outsource chores, and their husbands’ time spent on male-typed chores is effectively constrained, the women spend similar amounts of time on female-typed chores as other women. Even class-privileged women in cities are comparable to other class-privileged women in their time use, despite the abundance of services in cities that can be used to reduce their time spent on chores.

Taken together, these findings demonstrate that the social-interactional mechanisms driving the gendered division of housework persist even for those who seem unlikely to follow them. Many circumstances would suggest that urban men and women are more egalitarian in their time use than their suburban and rural counterparts. Their time spent on sex-typed chores, however, is essentially the same as those who live in suburban and rural areas, implying that differences in place are not enough to shift gendered expectations associated with housework. Ideas about what is “men’s work” and “women’s work” are extremely salient, and these divisions remain even when some tasks are structurally constrained, thus preventing sex-typed chores from being seen as shared responsibilities even when we might expect them to be.

Future research can build on this study to investigate other demographic groups and relevant measures. Our focus on heterosexuals excludes sexual minorities, and research suggests that gay men and lesbians, for example, take an egalitarian approach to housework that is less subject to gendered expectations (Jepsen and Jepsen 2002). Studies can build in a more systematic comparison of race, as the racial compositions across levels of urbanicity may account for some of the patterns we observe. Our conclusions are also limited by the ATUS/CPS data in two main ways. The data do not include detailed information on dwelling type (e.g., house vs. apartment), which likely predicts time use, nor do they include housework measures for both members of the respondent couple, thus limiting our ability to discuss the division of household labor within couples. Future work can use other data sets to further untangle to role of urbanicity in housework.

Although previous research has sorted household chores into those that are male- and female-typed, few studies have acknowledged that housework takes very different forms depending on where couples live. This study is the first to document urbanicity differences in men’s time spent on housework and, further, the remarkable consistency of women’s time use across urban, suburban, and rural areas. In doing so, we highlight a key factor that refines scholarly conceptions of gender inequality in housework.

Footnotes

Author’ Note:

We thank Brian Powell and Joan Kahn for their feedback on previous versions of this article. We are also grateful to the Maryland Population Research Center and Minnesota Population Center for conducting the 2016 ATUS-X workshop, in which the first author was a participant.

Notes

Natasha Quadlin is assistant professor of sociology at The Ohio State University. Her research focuses on social inequality in schools and families. Current projects examine perceptions of responsibility for college costs, income inequality among college graduates, and public attitudes toward gender and sexuality.

Long Doan is assistant professor of sociology at the University of Maryland. His research focuses on social psychological processes underpinning patterns of inequality. Current projects examine the emotional consequences of time use, responses to identity threats, and attitudes toward gender and sexuality.

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