Children’s gendered trajectories of housework time when leaving home

Abstract

Objective: To examine how young adult women and men change their time for routine housework when moving out of the parental household. Background: From a life-course perspective, establishing an own household is one of the key markers of the transition to adulthood. Leaving home is associated with new liabilities concerning the organization of everyday life, including housework, and provides a new context for doing gender. Methods: Changes in routine housework hours were estimated with longitudinal fixed effects regression and growth curve models, using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (1991–2020) on 1,914 young adult women and men experiencing the transition to an own household. Results: Young adult women and men increase their time for routine housework by 25 and 21 minutes, respectively, during the transition to an own household. The gender gap widens even further in couple compared to single-person households, and when the mothers were lowly educated. Conclusion: Young adult women and men follow traditional gendered patterns when leaving home. This increases gender inequality in housework time in early adulthood rather than sustaining processes of gender convergence.