Renzo Carriero and Lorenzo Todesco
University of Torino
CPS Department
ABSTRACT
Research extensively showed that objective inequalities in the division of housework are not necessarily viewed as unfair. Previous studies on the determinants of fairness have proven elusive because of some limitations due to the use of observational data, related to reverse causation and difficulty to disentangle the effects of strongly interconnected factors. This article aims to overcome such limitations using an innovative method in this research field: a vignette design combining the benefits of experiments with a higher capability of generalization. Moreover, this study suggests that equity and gender ideology theories, often considered in opposition by the research on fairness, should be integrated. Our findings, related to an Italian context, confirm the importance of equity, interpreted by subjects in symbolic rather than economic terms. Gender ideology, however, affects how subjects weight equity considerations.
We argue that equity and gender ideology theories are not really competing, but rather complementary and supplementary.
For the past four decades social scientists have been trying to understand the reasons behind the different pace between changes in the female participation to the labour force (faster) and changes in the division of housework (much slower). Theoretical explanations had to confront with evidence difficult to account for, and the persistence of gender inequality in the division of domestic labour represented a puzzle for scholars. Thus, an apparently simpler explanation made its way: such persistence could be due to the fact that an objective inequality is not always perceived to be unfair, and hence it does not prompt to change. Therefore many scholars shifted their attention from the dynamics underlying the division of domestic labour to those affecting the perception of fairness about this division. However, also the research in this field often provided inconclusive evidence, for two main reasons. First, two theoretical explanations applied to this topic, i.e. equity theory and gender ideology theory, have been generally considered to be opposite each other, while they actually emphasizes different elements of the fairness evaluation process. Second, the use of standard survey data in empirical tests has several methodological problems dealing with reverse causation, endogeneity, and the strong interconnection between some explanatory factors. This
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study, carried out in an Italian context, aims to overcome these limitations by suggesting a more integrated theoretical framework and by adopting an experimental method rarely used in this research field, which also allows a good generalization of findings.
THEORETICAL BACKGROUND
Perceived fairness can be considered as an evaluation of distributive justice based on the principle or criterion deemed legitimate for a given situation. Among the well-known principles highlighted by Deutsch (1975), namely equality, equity and need, the first is not necessarily the one most frequently applied by partners to the division of housework. Deciding whether one receives a fair treatment depends on individual expectations which, in turn, are based on social comparisons: individuals compare their actual situation with what they think to deserve on the basis of some relevant referent (e.g., another person, a group, their past experience or an abstract behavioural model), which work as a sort of benchmark (Crosby 1976, 1982, Merton 1957). Fairness evaluation always arises within a frame of reference; this implies that individuals can be objectively deprived without feeling dissatisfied because, comparing themselves with persons perceived to be similar, they do not feel entitled to have more.
These general rules of fairness evaluation are interpreted differently by two theoretical frameworks – equity theory and gender ideology theory – that are most commonly used in empirical research on perceived fairness about the division of housework. These theories are often presented as alternative accounts of the same phenomenon (see, e.g., Lennon and Rosenfield 1994, Layte
1998, DeMaris and Longmore 1996), but as we will argue, this is not necessarily true. According to equity theory (Walster et al. 1978, Adams 1965), which is tightly linked to social exchange theory
(Blau 1964, Homans 1974, Thibaut and Kelley 1959), fairness arises whenever each individual’s outcomes are proportional to his/her inputs. The former are the rewards received from a social exchange, while the latter are the contributions given to it; the partner of the exchange and the
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proportionality rule represent the relevant referents. In couple relationships, a husband’s input is usually the wife’s outcome, and vice versa; equity is achieved when the husband’s ratio between input and outcome is similar to the wife’s one (hereinafter the terms husband, wife and marital relationship are used also for unmarried cohabiting couples). In most cases, equity is not achieved through an exactly equal contribution of both partners to each domain of the couple life; instead, an unequal input/outcome ratio in a domain can be counterbalanced by an unequal input/outcome ratio, in the opposite direction, in another domain (DeMaris and Longmore 1996).
Couple relationships involve the exchange of a wide range of tangible and intangible inputs and outcomes. As regards the tangible ones, two important domains of exchange are household goods and services (e.g., meals, cleaning, laundry and caregiving activities) and the family’s standard of living. The main contribution to the former is the time devoted to housework, care of children and frail elderly, while the contributions to the latter are mainly income and the number of hours devoted to paid work (DeMaris and Longmore 1996).
Within the framework of equity theory, an example of exchange affecting the perception of fairness occurs between income and time devoted to domestic chores (for the role of income and individual resources in the division of housework see, e.g., Blood and Wolfe 1960, Cunningham
2007, Aasve et al. 2014). Individuals who contribute less to the household income should perceive less unfairness about the division of unpaid work even if they do most of the tasks: fewer resources to put in the relationship reduce expectations about what can be obtained in exchange; therefore, the standards of fairness get lower (Lennon and Rosenfield 1994). Another example of exchange affecting the perception of fairness occurs between time devoted to paid and unpaid work: a lopsided division of housework can be considered to be fair if the partner doing less at home compensates for it with longer working hours (DeMaris and Longmore 1996; for the relationship between paid and unpaid work see, e.g., Nooman et al. 2007, Aasve et al. 2014, Huber and Spitze
1983). However, it must be stressed that this mechanism works only if both partners are involved and agree in the decision about the division of tasks and responsibilities within the couple (in this
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respect, see also the role of procedural justice in the conceptual framework developed by Major
(1987) and Thompson (1991)). An important characteristic of this theory is its gender neutrality: what matters is the proportionality between inputs and outcomes, regardless of the kind of inputs each partner puts in the exchange.
In sum, according to equity theorists paid work, unpaid work and income represent valuable inputs that can be exchanged within the couple in order to obtain an equitable deal. This line of reasoning assumes self-interested actors, and may seem at first sight a strange notion to apply to intimate relationships based on love, commitment and trust (indeed, Bahr and Bahr 2001 criticized the family literature exactly on this point). However, the spreading of marital instability in most western countries (see, e.g., Goode 1993) shows that many people are not unconditionally committed to their marriage and that selfish behaviour is not absent from intimate relationships, at least to some extent. This opens the possibility that equity theory can be applied also to the dynamics between partners, even if with due caution, as actually has been done since early studies
(Utne et al. 1984, Davidson 1984). However, it must be considered that it is not easy to establish the exchange value of the time devoted to domestic work, when compared with that devoted to paid work or with a certain amount of income (on this and other limits of equity theory see Kellerhals et al. 1988). Another issue is that in couple relationships the exchange between paid work, unpaid work and income can be valued not only in materialistic terms, but also looking at its symbolic meaning: an exchange can be considered fair, even if it seems to be more favourable for a partner from a strictly economic standpoint, according to the logic of symbolic exchange (Haas and Deseran
1981).
Another account of fairness evaluation, emphasizing the role of norms, values and identities in shaping individual expectations and the choice of referents, is provided by gender ideology theory. This theoretical perspective is characterised by an approach stressing the importance of cultural elements in explaining individual actions as well as in shaping actors’ understanding of social reality. Although mostly used to account for the division of domestic work (see, e.g., Aasve
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et al. 2014, Chesters 2013, Davis et al. 2007, Erickson 2005), it is useful also to shed light on fairness perception.
Gender ideology can be defined as the set of beliefs and attitudes about the appropriate roles of men and women in society and the way a person places himself/herself and relevant others with regard to work and family roles, normally linked to the gender social structure. Couple relationships provide arenas in which this ideology is played out, serving the function of providing an opportunity for the partners to behave in ways that validate their identities as masculine and feminine, that is, to display the visible aspects of their gender ideologies (Greenstein 1996b).
According to Berk (1985), housework represents one of the cornerstones of the different roles and responsibilities of men and women, since it has been traditionally considered a typical female work; consequently, it is one of the main contexts in which gender membership can be symbolically created, accomplishing (or refusing to accomplish) the different domestic tasks (see also Goffman
1976, Butler 1990, Jackson and Scott 2002, Erickson 2005).
According to this theory, women embracing a traditional gender ideology are more prone to consider the management of housework as an integral part of the proper female identity. For these women, doing most or all the chores is a behaviour legitimated by values and norms that they are accustomed to by their own socialization (Coverman 1985, Goldscheider and Waite 1991, Peters
1994), or by their “doing gender” practices performed in daily life (West and Zimmerman 1987,
Berk 1985, South and Spitze 1994, Deutsch 2007). Consequently, a disadvantageous division of housework is not necessarily evaluated as unfair; in some cases, the share of domestic labour is simply not subjected to an evaluation of fairness. On the contrary, women with an egalitarian gender ideology do not consider running a household and raising children as a cornerstone of their female identity; instead, they expect a substantial male contribution to the chores for identitary reasons in order to promote equal opportunities, and they are not willing to consider an unequal division of tasks to be fair. In short, it can be maintained that “gender ideology functions as a kind of lens through which inequalities in the division of domestic activities are viewed. According to
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the nature of that lens, such inequalities may be perceived as unfair or fair, inequitable or equitable”
(Greenstein 1996a: 1031). So, men and women will have different reactions to an unequal division of domestic work that are contingent on their gender ideology.
Greenstein (1996a) went into detail about the mechanism through which gender ideology affect the perception of fairness. In his view, gender ideology mainly serves to provide partners with a comparative referent, an element whose importance was already stressed by Major (1987) and Thompson (1991) and even earlier by Crosby (1982, 1976). According to Greenstein, individuals differing in gender ideology use very different comparative referents. A traditional woman will compare her contribution to the chores with that of her mother or with that of other traditional women; in this case, she may not perceive an objective inequality as unfair, because she feels that it is consistent with the situation of other women ideologically similar to her. On the contrary, an egalitarian woman will choose as comparison referent her partner, or other egalitarian women, or an abstract model of how egalitarian relationships are supposed to work; consequently, she will feel more unfairness if she has to do most of the domestic chores (as regards the effect of the between-sex comparisons on the sense of fairness, see also Major 1987, 1994).
Equity and gender ideology theories have often been regarded as quite irreconcilable because of the gender blindness of the former and its focus on utilitarian behaviour, neglecting the role of norms and values. Yet, in our view, they might be less distant than generally assumed. If the above presentation is correct, equity theory, with respect to gender ideology theory, just emphasizes different elements of the fairness evaluation process. All in all, the latter insists on how beliefs and attitudes toward gender roles affect the judgment of inequality in the division of housework, and does not categorically exclude that actors take into account equity considerations, that could simply be weighted differently. For example, even if a traditional woman (or man) tends to compare her housework contribution to that of other traditional (models of) women, this does not mean that she has to ignore her partner’s contribution, unless one assumes “culturally doped” actors. She might simply overweight her partner’s inputs to certain domains of the marital exchange (e.g. paid work)
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and underweight her own (e.g. unpaid work) compared to what an egalitarian woman would do. If this is correct, empirical predictions derived from equity theory are not necessarily competing with gender ideology, but complementary and supplementary.
EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE
In the last 25 years, a number of studies has been devoted to test the predictions of the equity and gender ideology theories about the perception of fairness in the division of domestic labour.
Most of these studies have been carried out in the United States (if not otherwise specified) and exclude childcare (for an exception, see the Australian study by Baxter 2000). However, the results achieved so far have been proven elusive, revealing the need for further empirical research conducted with more innovative methodological tools.
The analysis strategy of a first group of studies simply consists in testing the main effects of the different factors suggested by equity and gender ideology theories, i.e. time devoted to housework and paid employment, income and gender attitudes, on the perception of fairness.
Among these studies, Demaris and Longmore (1996) is one of the first testing all the factors suggested by these theories on both men and women. These scholars found that several variables tapping objective equity had a significant impact on the perception of fairness, whereas some others did not. The greater the husband's relative contribution to routine housework, the less likely either partner was to say that the division of housework is unfair to the wife. Moreover, the greater the husband's number of hours in paid work, relative to his wife's, the less likely she was to perceive the division of housework as unfair. However, for husbands, the partners' relative contributions to market activities were not statistically significant. Finally, income had no effect in the perception of fairness for both husbands and wives. Of the other factors expected to affect the perception of fairness, gender ideology was significant for both husbands and wives: egalitarian husbands tended
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to see the division of housework as more unfair to their wives, and the more wives endorsed the sharing of housework, the more they saw the existing arrangement as unfair to them.
Other studies following the same analysis strategy largely confirmed the expected effect of the time devoted to housework on the perception of fairness, particularly for male contribution to feminine tasks (Baxter and Western 1998 for Australia, Sanchez and Kane 1996, Sanchez 1994,
Nordenmark and Nyman 2003 for Sweden, Lennon and Rosenfield 1994, Benin and Agostinelli
1988, Baxter 2000, Young et al. 2013 in a study devoted to a Canadian sample of lawyers).
However, the evidence is less straightforward as regards the effect of the contribution to paid employment: a few studies give at least some support to the prediction of equity theory (Sanchez and Kane 1996, Baxter 2000, Young et al. 2013), but many others reject it at all (Lennon and
Rosenfield 1994, Baxter and Western 1998, Benin and Agostinelli 1988, Sanchez 1994,
Nordenmark and Nyman 2003). A common finding among the studies cited so far is the fact that none of these show any effect of income on the perception of fairness about the division of domestic chores. As regards gender ideology factors, their role in the perception of fairness remains unclear, with some studies in line with theoretical expectations (Baxter and Western 1998, Sanchez and Kane 1996) and others not (Lennon and Rosenfield 1994, Baxter 2000).
Some scholars (Braun et al. 2008, in a comparative study) maintain that the inconsistencies between these studies may be due to a problem of analysis strategy. Although the role of the factors suggested by equity and gender ideology theories have been studied, their effects have typically been modelled in an additive rather than interactive way. Braun and colleagues, following an idea already put in practice by Greenstein (1996a) for the role of gender ideology, argue that time devoted to paid work, income and gender attitudes shape the perception of fairness working in interaction with the actual inequality of the division of domestic activities; according to these authors, just analyzing the main effects, as done by the studies cited so far, would lead to biased and inconclusive results, because “different groups of women react differently to inequality of the household division of labor” (Braun et al. 2008: 1152). In other words, the effect of the division of
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domestic labour on the fairness perception should change according to the levels of the paid work, income, and gender ideology.
The analyses put forward by Braun and colleagues take into account both the main effects and the interactions between various factors affecting the perception of fairness and the actual division of domestic chores. Their findings give support to equity theory. The more women are involved in paid work, the stronger is their reaction to an increasingly unequal division of the chores; for economically dependent women, perceived equity decreases less with increasing inequality in housework than for independent women. Also the predictions from the gender ideology theory found corroboration: egalitarian women perceive more unfairness for an increasing inequality in the division of domestic labour than traditional ones. In particular, the authors noticed that the effects of gender ideology are only significant when the analysis includes interaction terms with the division of housework. According to Braun and colleagues, this reveals the complexity of the relationship between perceptions of fairness and the organization of the household.
The idea of working with interaction effects has been followed also in other studies, but only in empirical tests of the gender ideology theory. Even in this case, however, several doubts about the consistency of the findings still remain. Some studies are in line with what found by Braun and colleagues (Lavee and Katz 2002 in Israel, Greenstein 1996a, Layte 1998 in the UK), but some others are not, or give only marginal support (Blair and Johnson 1992, Piña and Bengston 1993). In
Greenstein’s (2009) comparative study, the interaction between wife’s share of housework and gender ideology has no effect on perceived fairness; however, according to this scholar this is due to the fact that national-level gender equity is taken into account in the analysis. This suggests that the national context may be a more important determinant of perceptions of fairness than individual-level gender ideology.
The choice to include in the analysis both the main effects of paid work, income and gender ideology and their interactions with the division of domestic chores is a first important step towards the full comprehension of the dynamics related to the perception of fairness. However, two
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important methodological problems still remain unsolved, and probably affect seriously the findings of the research carried out so far. The first one is a general issue concerning reverse causation in the relationship between attitudes and behaviours. All previous studies assume that the division of housework affects the perception of fairness; however, it cannot be ruled out that perceived
(un)fairness influences in turn the distribution of time within the household. Consequently, a portion of the effect of the latter on the former might be endogenous. Secondly, analyses based on survey data generally do not allow to disentangle the effects of factors that are strongly interconnected in real life (i.e. paid work, unpaid work, and income). It is difficult to infer the effect of one of them on perceived fairness because they are part of complex causal chains and are the outcomes of decisions that actors make jointly (i.e. the allocation of time to different activities).
This study aims to provide an empirical test of the equity and gender ideology theories going beyond the limitations of previous research. The main innovation of this study is the adoption of an experimental method; this choice is due to the fact that it is the best strategy to address the different methodological issues described above (see the next section). These issues are strongly related to the use of observational data, both cross section and longitudinal. To the best of our knowledge, only one study (Antonides and Kroft 2005) based on a small convenience sample adopted a near experimental, but less sophisticated, approach to the topic tackled here, but without testing equity or gender ideology hypotheses.
Beyond its innovative methodology, this study improves previous research in two other ways. First, attention is devoted to the main effects of paid work, income and gender ideology and their interactions with the division of domestic chores, whereas the other studies giving space to interaction effects focused only on gender ideology, except for that by Braun and colleagues (2008).
Moreover, our analysis is more generalizable because it includes men’s perception of fairness, while all other studies testing interactions concentrated solely on wives’ views. Second, our study introduces a dynamic dimension in the analysis of the perception of fairness. Previous empirical research considered situations in which the different factors suggested by equity and gender
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ideology theories remain constant within subjects. On the contrary, here we consider also a scenario of a request of housework renegotiation due to a change in paid work time (for details, see the next section). This choice allows to carry out an additional and innovative empirical test of the theoretical perspectives used here, which gives further solidity to our analysis. We will test the following hypotheses:
H1a: according to equity theory, inequality in housework, irrespective of the sex of who is disadvantaged, is judged to be fair if it is compensated with an opposite inequality in paid work contribution.
H1b: according to equity theory, inequality in housework, irrespective of the sex of who is disadvantaged, is judged to be fair if it is compensated with an opposite inequality in income contribution.
H2: according to gender ideology theory, a division of housework unfavourable to the wife is judged more unfair by egalitarian individuals than by traditional minded ones.
On the contrary, a division of housework unfavourable to the husband is judged more unfair by traditional minded individuals than by egalitarian ones.
H3: according to equity theory, a request of housework renegotiation is considered to be more legitimate if it serves to redress a prior inequity, irrespective of the sex of who ask for the renegotiation.
H4: according to gender ideology theory, wife’s requests of housework renegotiation are at least as much justified as the husband’s for egalitarian individuals, and less justified for traditional ones.
METHOD
Our study combined a standard phone survey method with an on line questionnaire containing vignettes or scenarios administered to the same respondents interviewed by phone. Vignettes are an
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experimental method consisting in verbal descriptions of fictitious (but realistic) situations to be evaluated by subjects (Mutz 2011, ch. 4, Wallander 2009). A vignette’s description contains one or more variable elements called factors (i.e. variables deemed to affect an individual’s judgment about the vignette) that are randomly assigned to respondents. Random assignment makes it possible to assess the causal effect of the factors on people’s judgments. Indeed, since its presentation, this method was proposed as a tool to uncover the underlying principles behind human judgements of social objects, the latter being “actions, objects, other persons, other groups, institutions, ideas, and so on” (Rossi and Anderson 1982: 15). A strength of this method is that, unlike laboratory experiments, vignettes can be implemented in a survey in order to generalize their findings to a wider population. Of course, this advantage is not intrinsic in the vignette method, but it is related to the sampling procedure used to select individuals for the survey.
Applying this method to fairness perception about the division of housework is a convenient way to address the methodological problems affecting the research carried out so far on this topic. Thanks to the experimental manipulation of stimuli made possible by the vignettes, the causal direction between behaviours (division of housework) and attitudes (perception of fairness) is completely unequivocal. Moreover, the different factors usually strongly interconnected (division of housework, time devoted to paid work, income) are made fully independent among each other.
Our sample was randomly drawn from the landline telephone directories of four provinces (Torino,
Alessandria, Novara and Cuneo) of Piemonte region, located in North-west Italy. By means of a few screening questions, we selected dual-earner married or cohabitating couples with at least one child aged less than 13 years. The particular circumstances of this target, characterized by multiple sources of time pressures (from work and family responsibilities), made the choice of this sample highly relevant because it is among these households that the issue of perceived fairness about the division of housework becomes much more salient. In all the provinces where the survey took place, the female employment rate is higher than the national average (in 2013 for Turin,
Alessandria, Novara and Cuneo the rate was 55.9%, 53.3%, 52.7% and 58.1%, respectively, against
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46.5% at the national level), but actually not very different from the north (56,6%) and central
(52,0%) areas of the country (ISTAT 2014). Moreover, according to our elaborations of the latest
Italian time use survey data (2008-09), in Piemonte the division of housework among dual-earner couples, as measured by the ratio of women’s to men’s time devoted to domestic chores, is almost identical (2.7) to that of other north-central regions (2.8 on average) and a bit less traditional than southern regions (3.9). So, although confined to four northern provinces, our sample can be considered fairly representative of Italian households in similar family conditions living in most part of the country, at least for the characteristics of main interest here. Even if our sample is not perfectly representative of all Italian dual-earner couples with children, it is a much better approximation – and contains much more variance – than any other convenience sample commonly used in experimental designs.
828 couples (1656 individuals, response rate 42%) were interviewed by phone using a structured questionnaire about the division of domestic and care tasks, perceived fairness, gender roles, and paid work. Data were collected from October 2010 to February 2011. During Spring 2013, individuals were contacted again to collect their email address. We were able to reach 1365 individuals of the original sample (82%) to whom the on line questionnaire with the vignettes was sent. 771 individuals (56% of the email list or 47% of the original sample) responded to the questionnaire. Among these respondents, 74% form household couples with other respondents in the sample and hence they are not statistically independent units. However, we made robustness checks of all our findings by randomly sampling one respondent per couple and we did not find substantial differences.
As can be easily understood, the final sample discounts a considerable drop in the number of cases and it is unlikely that this happened completely at random. Indeed, actual respondents were positively selected by education, as is often the case with all survey modes. However, other important characteristics such as the division of housework or perceived fairness were not significantly distorted by the self-selection process occurred between the phone survey and the on
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line questionnaire (results not shown; descriptive statistics of the sample are reported in the
Appendix).
In this article we focus on the vignette evidence and use phone survey data only to characterize respondents in terms of their own sex, education, gender ideology and division of domestic labour. The latter two variables are crucial to identify egalitarian individuals. Usually egalitarian gender ideology is captured from respondents’ answers to attitude questions. However, given the known problems with attitude questions in terms of social desirability bias, we also classified individuals as egalitarian or traditional by means of their domestic behaviour. In practice, to classify respondents’ attitudes we first created a scale of gender ideology using 7 items (shown in
Appendix) related to gender roles (alpha=0,62; higher scores indicate more traditional orientation) and then sorted respondents in three groups (namely egalitarian, transitional, traditional; cfr. Lavee and Katz 2002), using tertiles as breaking points of the variable. In the same way, we classified interviewees according to their own division of domestic labour (egalitarian, collaborative, traditional), keeping in mind that partners’ behaviour does not necessarily reflect their preferences.
Respondents’ division of domestic labour (excluding childcare) was measured using wife’s answers about the allocation of different domestic tasks between her and her husband. Having interviewed both husband and wife, we checked that in most cases their answers about this allocation do not differ substantially.
The on line questionnaire contained eight vignettes dealing with family issues, of which only two were used for this article. The first vignette dealt with the fairness of a given family arrangement in terms of paid and unpaid work. The following is the English translation of the text (factors and associated levels reported in brackets):
The Rossi family consists of a husband and wife who both work. (They have no children / They have a 2-year-old son) . The wife contributes to family income by approximately (two-thirds / one half / one-third) and devotes to her job (10 hours less per week than her husband / 10 hours
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more per week than her husband / the same number of hours of her husband) . At home, the division of chores between the spouses takes place in this way: the wife does about (20% / 50%
/ 80%) of the housework and the rest is done by the husband. Taking into account all these elements, how do you personally judge the division of housework in this family?
Respondents had to judge the fairness of the division of housework represented in the vignette using a 0-100 scale (0=completely unfair to the husband; 50=fair to both; 100=completely unfair to the wife). This vignette manipulated the three factors pointed out by the equity theory related to the exchange of time (paid and unpaid work) and money inputs within the household. The fourth factor
(children in the home) was introduced as control condition that might alter the judgment, given that the presence of young children fosters a traditional division of both housework and childcare (see, e.g., Gjerdingen and Center 2004, Grunow et al. 2012, Schober 2013, Kühhirt 2011).
The second vignette concerned the justifiability of a renegotiation request about the division of domestic labour, due to an unemployment episode that creates an involuntary imbalance between wife’s (Luisa) and husband’s (Federico) contribution to paid work time (and consequently to income, even if the subject receives an unemployment benefit). This imbalance happens within a domestic arrangement that, depending on the manipulation’s outcome, can be egalitarian or unequal to his or her advantage. The English translation of the text is the following. Notice that once the character’s sex (i.e.,
Luisa / Federico ) is manipulated the first time then all the other varying elements are consequently fixed.
Luisa and Federico form a family and (do not have children / have a child / have two children) .
Both are full-time employed. At home, Luisa does (most / about half / a small part) of the chores and the rest is done by Federico. At one point, (Luisa / Federico) is laid off, so (she / he) has much more free time than before. (Federico / Luisa) then asks (Luisa / Federico) - having regard to (her / his) new time availability - to take charge also of the housework previously done by (him / her). Taking into account all these elements, according to your personal opinion
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how justified or unjustified is (Federico’s / Luisa’s) request? Please, express your opinion on a
1 to 10 scale where 1 = totally unjustified and 10 = totally justified.
In practice, this vignette allows to study the perceived legitimacy, and implicitly fairness, of changes in housework that can bring the situation closer or farther to the equity point, depending on the previous division of housework and the new occupational status of one of the partners. For example, if the prior division of housework was unequal to his advantage, his request of renegotiation, consequent to her unemployment, should be less justified than if the prior division of housework was egalitarian or unequal to her advantage. The manipulation of the sex of who becomes unemployed served to control for the existence of gendered standard of evaluation, as can be hypothesized following the gender ideology perspective. The children factor was introduced for the same reason as in the first vignette. To ease the interpretation of results, we recoded the wife’s
(i.e. Luisa’s) share of housework in order to make it correspond to that of the subject who asks for the renegotiation. So, for example, if Luisa did most of the chores and Federico asks for the renegotiation after her unemployment, we recoded the variable “share of housework” as if
Federico’s share were a little part of the chores . In this way the share of housework has always the same meaning, whatever the subject who asks.
Unlike the so-called factorial surveys (Wallander 2009), where subjects are given multiple versions of the same vignette, in our study respondents evaluated only a particular version of each vignette.
Therefore our research design can be classified as a between-subject design whose main advantage, given the large number of cases, is the possibility to test the effects of various factors avoiding the sensitization and carryover effects due to multiple evaluations of the same vignette (Greenwald
1976). However, we could not control the presentation order of the different vignettes. Actually, the vignettes analysed here were presented one after the other.
Subjects’ ratings of the vignettes were expressed by means of numerical scales (0-100 or 1-10) thus enabling us to analyse data by means of multiple-factor ANOVAs. As pointed to in the empirical
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section, also selected interaction effects among the factors were included in the analysis. The randomization of vignette factors makes theoretically and practically useless to control for respondents’ characteristics. The latter instead are included as covariates interacting with selected vignette factors in order to test specific hypotheses derived from gender ideology theory, or to ascertain possible sources of heterogeneity in average experimental effects.
RESULTS
Vignette 1: fairness evaluation of the division of housework
Table 1 reports the ANOVA for the vignette concerning the fairness evaluation of the division of housework. The following findings are not splitted by respondent’s sex, since this covariate did not interact with any of the vignette’s factors (results not shown). In line with predictions of equity theory, significant effects of wife’s % of housework and wife’s hours of paid work have been found
(model 1). However, the significant interaction between them is of major interest because it means that the effect of the division of housework on fairness judgment is contingent upon wife’s involvement in paid work. These findings support hypothesis 1a insofar as fairness can be achieved, not only through a perfect equal distribution of domestic work, but also through an exchange between the latter and paid work (Graph 1). Indeed, when the wife works 10 hours more than her husband and she does just 20% of the housework, the division is considered approximately fair
(avg. score = 55, being 50 the equity point). However the exactly opposite situation (i.e., the wife doing 80% of housework and working 10 hours less outside home than her husband) was not found fair by interviewees, but rather unfair to the wife (avg. score = 34). This asymmetry is maybe the consequences of respondents’ willingness not to legitimate the wife’s traditional home-making role, a model that they perhaps do not want to support explicitly, although they still largely conforms to, given that women in our sample spend much less time in paid work than men (results not shown).
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Besides this, the explanation for the asymmetry could lie in the fact that, because of technical and substantive reasons linked to the likelihood of factors combinations, we didn’t test the whole range of wife’s contribution to housework or paid work. So it might be that a different combination of time inputs could make it fair the exchange.
The ANOVA table (model 1) shows also that the effect of wife’s contribution to family income has a significant main effect at conventional levels (p=0.042), but its interaction with housework is not significant at all. Therefore this result does not support hypothesis 1b: although income contribution seems to affect judgements in some way, it cannot be exchanged with partner’s housework to get equity. Put it differently, money (hopefully!) can’t buy fairness, at least within the family. We also tested the third order interaction effect between income, paid work time and housework, but it was not significant (results not shown). However, it is of interest that the situation in which the wife does 80% of housework and 10 hours less of paid work is considered less unfair for her (avg. score
= 41) if her income contribution is 1/3 than if it is 1/2 (avg. score = 35) or 2/3 (avg. score = 27; results not shown).
Finally, by introducing the effect of the gender ideology covariates and its interaction with the vignette’s division of housework (Table 1, model 2 and 3), we found partial support for hypothesis
2: egalitarian individuals judge domestic inequalities unfavourable to the wife more negatively than traditional minded individuals, but the latter do not judge domestic inequalities unfavourable to the husband more negatively than egalitarian (see also Graph 2). However, this holds true (at conventional statistical level) only for the behavioural definition of gender ideology, based on the division of housework (model 2), while for the one based on attitudes the interaction effect is in line with the hypothesis but does not reach statistical significance (model 3). We also checked for differential effects of vignette factors across education sub-groups but this individual covariate did not interact with any of the factors (results not shown).
18

Vignette 2: renegotiating the division of housework
Table 2 reports the ANOVA for the vignette concerning the renegotiation request about the division of housework consequent to the partner’s job loss. The findings show that the share of housework prior to unemployment and the sex of who becomes unemployed have significant main effects
(model 1). The main effect of sex holds on average but it is strongly driven by men’s answers in our sample. This is proved by the significant interaction between respondent’s sex and the vignette’s sex (Table 2, model 2). Indeed, men tend to systematically justify the wife’s request more that the husband’s (perhaps for fear to appear male chauvinist), while women do not.
Graph 3 illustrates substantive findings, split by respondent’s sex. Notice first that all means are above 6 on a 1-10 scale, meaning that the renegotiation request on average is considered legitimate enough, whatever the situation. The unemployment episode creates an imbalance in paid work contribution that, in line with equity theory, can be legitimately compensated by an opposite imbalance in housework, whatever the starting point. Moreover it can be seen that, in accordance with our hypothesis 3, the request is more justified if it serves to redress a prior inequity. Among both women’s and men’s answers, the fairness score is higher when the vignette’s subject did most of the chores than when he/she did about half of the chores or less. In the first case, the prior division of housework was inequitable because not counterbalanced with a symmetrical inequality in paid work (both spouses were full time employed). Also in accordance with equity theory, given its gender neutrality, is the result that, at least among women, the fairness scores do not differ significantly by vignette’s sex (we made statistical tests and separate analyses by respondents’ sex not shown here), whereas among men the differences are clearly due to a social desirability bias.
Finally, we found significant interaction effects between the vignette’s sex and respondent’s gender ideology variables that partially meet our hypothesis 4 (see table 2, model 3 and 4). The effect of who becomes unemployed is stronger among respondents who practice an egalitarian division of housework in their own families and those who reported egalitarian attitudes. Both groups display a
19

sort of “pro-wife bias” in their judgments, i.e. the wife’s request is on average more justified than the husband’s. On the contrary, no difference between wives’ and husbands’ requests are found among respondents who practice more traditional household arrangements or have more conservative opinions about gender roles. Again, this is actually a compositional result due to men’s and women’s answers. Among the former, a systematic over-justification of the wife’s request is found again, although much less evident among traditional minded men. Traditional women instead, in line with our expectations, consider the husband’s request slightly more justified than the wife’s, while for egalitarian ones the contrary is true (Graph 4 and 5; we made statistical tests not shown here revealing statistically significant differences).
As in the first vignette, no significant interaction between any of the factors and respondent’s education has been found (results not shown).
DISCUSSION
In this article we tested several hypotheses on the role and interplay of equity principles and gender ideology in perceived fairness about the division of housework. Here we summarize and discuss our main findings and conclude with some considerations for future research.
Equity and gender ideology theories are often considered diametrically opposed views.
However, here it is shown that these theories seem to complement rather than compete each other.
This is maybe the most relevant contribution of this study. The first vignette shows that, as suggested by the equity theory, paid and unpaid work can be traded in order to reach an equitable deal, at least to a certain extent. However, gender ideology plays a role in this process, beyond and above the “compensations” that can be offered within the exchange. In line with Greenstein
(1996a), gender ideology works as a lens through which inequalities in the input/output exchange are viewed, turning (or not) in inequities: egalitarian individuals are more severe than traditional minded ones in the evaluation of inequalities against women. This result mirrors at micro level what
20

has been already found at macro level: gender inequalities in domestic work are less tolerated in more egalitarian countries (Greenstein 2009).
Also some findings from the second vignette support the contention of an integration between equity and gender ideology theories. On the one hand, a request of housework renegotiation due to an unemployment episode for one partner is always considered to be legitimate, whatever the previous division of paid and unpaid work. This follows the predictions of equity theory: an unemployed person can fill in the gap in equity terms with a partner engaged in market activities by carrying out most or all domestic activities. Always in line with equity theory, the renegotiation request is more legitimated if it compensates for a previous imbalance in the division of responsibilities; moreover, the same legitimacy is given, at least by women, both to the husband’s and to the wife’s request. On the other hand, the level of legitimacy depends on gender ideology: egalitarian women legitimate wife’s request more than husband’s, while the opposite is found among traditional ones.
It must be said that some findings of the study do not support the predictions of equity and gender ideology theories. First, equity theory requires an important qualification: the kind of exchange that individuals seems to consider fair has a symbolic rather than economic foundation, as might be expected within marital relationships. This can be seen by the fact that income does not enter in the evaluation of fairness of a given domestic arrangement. Moreover, the effect of paid work time on fairness is independent on its monetary value, being income exogenous here and included in the ANOVA presented here. Thus, time inputs (paid and unpaid work) can be considered bargaining chips, regardless of economic considerations. Another result to be stressed is that men systematically over-justify the wife’s request of housework renegotiation, while women do not. This is not in line with equity theory, given its gender neutrality, and at a deeper view strongly clashes also with gender ideology theory: even traditional men legitimate more the wife’s request than the husband’s one, while the opposite was expected. The most plausible explanation for these unforeseen results seems to be a serious social desirability bias due to the growing social support for
21

equal opportunities: men, given the benefit they get from gender inequalities, need to show their sympathy for the female condition in order not to be considered male chauvinist or backwardlooking, even the more traditional ones. This possible explanation is supported by the fact that also in another occasion our respondents seemed to be more sympathetic with the female rather than male condition: in the first vignette traditional individuals did not judge a division of housework unfavourable to the husband more unfair than egalitarian ones, as could be expected following the gender ideology theory. Anyway, it must also be considered that the degree of traditionalism in gender ideology is relative to the sample used here: traditional respondents are more educated than the national average and live in dual earner couples. For these reasons, they could be more sympathetic to female condition than what one would expect.
On closer consideration, the acceptance of the equity principle, at least partly supported by both vignettes’ results, can reveal a double-edged sword for the achievement of equal gender opportunities since it can legitimate household arrangements in which the wife is mainly devoted to the chores and the husband to paid work. In this way, the division of domestic labour could be considered to be fair in the short run, but in the long run women’s career opportunities will be undermined and their accumulation of “non marital specific” skills that allow to earn money will be lowered. This is perhaps the reason that motivates the rejection of the arrangement in the first vignette assigning most of the housework but less paid work to the wife. This is judged much less fair than an arrangement turning traditional roles upside down. In the former case, indeed, the woman’s right to be autonomous is threatened and the wife’s role seems to conform too much to the traditional one. Although this would resemble respondents’ average case a great deal, it is not something that they want to explicitly support with their judgments.
In the discussion of the findings of this study, it should be borne in mind that the evaluation of the fictitious situations put forward here might not correspond to the judgements of personal situations. Vignette’s subjects are all equal, except for their mentioned varying characteristics, and their circumstances are inevitably abstract to a certain extent. Respondents may thus be induced to
22

apply the equality rule to the vignette’s context more frequently than they would do with their own situation. Survey data abundantly document that in real life circumstances people’s judgments can deviate from the strict application of the equality rule because of particular features of their household or their partner, or simply because they need to avoid cognitive dissonance. Along this line of reasoning, Deutsch (1975) stated that one of the criteria used to value the fairness of a distribution is need, i.e. the fact some people because of their condition are entitled to a particular treatment. For instance, a man can be considered unable to do appropriately some domestic tasks, and this would legitimate the woman’s engagement.
Some attention should be devoted also to the institutional and cultural context in which this study is placed, even if this is often overlooked in experimental research. It is well-known that Italy is a traditional country in all issues related to gender roles and equal opportunities, and the division of housework is not an exception. Some comparative studies (Fuwa 2004, Knudsen and Wærness
2008) on the division of housework have shown that the effect of individual gender ideologies is lower in traditional than in egalitarian countries. If this holds true even for the perception of fairness, it could be expected than in other countries gender ideology plays a more relevant role than that found by this study. The equity theory should be less affected by the institutional and cultural context, given its gender neutrality and its focus on utilitarian behaviour; not surprisingly, the effect of one of its elements (income) on the division of housework across countries is controversial (Fuwa does not find any difference, while according to Knudsen and Wærness the effect is stronger in more egalitarian countries, like that of gender ideology). Finally, it is difficult to speculate about possible differences in the social desirability bias that affects the men’s findings in this study. In less conservative countries the social support for equal gender opportunities is stronger than in Italy, and consequently traditional men should be further induced to hide their gender attitudes. This would lead to a higher bias. However, this is true only assuming that conservative men in egalitarian countries (e.g. Sweden) are as much conservative as Italian ones.
23

This study makes a further step in the comprehension of the evaluation of fairness in the division of domestic labour. However, more research is needed to overcome the limitations of the theoretical and empirical contents put forward here. As previously pointed out, the main contribution of this study is the attempt to combine two theories usually considered competing with each other. The empirical results seem to give some support, but further tests are necessary in order to strengthen our intuition and, although this was beyond the scope of an empirical article like this one, more theoretical work is required to build a full and coherent framework combining equity and gender ideologies theories. As regards methodological issues, vignettes proved to be a powerful tool to study the causal effects of factors whose impact cannot be easily assessed in observational studies; this method allows to combine the strength of experimental research with the generalizability of survey data. For this reason, it should be implemented in large scale national and possibly cross country surveys. The cost of this choice both in terms of money and space is reasonable, and the large sample size would allow to present vignettes manipulating several factors.
Moreover, the findings would be generalizable to whole countries, unlike those presented here.
However, two points related to this method need careful consideration in future studies. The first concerns the degree of realism and concreteness of the vignettes. On the one hand, too much abstractness entails the risk that respondents evaluate the vignette in rather different ways from what they would do in real circumstances. On the other hand, providing too many details in order to make the vignette more realistic undermines the generalizability of the situation and also risks to distract respondents’ attention from the vignette’s relevant factors. The second issue regards the vignettes’ capacity to attenuate social desirability biases that affect standard survey questions.
Despite literature claims (Wallander 2009, Alexander and Becker 1978), our experience showed that this capacity cannot be taken for granted. Probably men’s great reactivity to this bias
(particularly evident in the second vignette) is partly motivated by their knowledge of the survey goals, topics and its proponent, due to the fact that the vignette evaluation was the second step of the data collection, that took place after a previous phone interview (see the methodological
24

section). However we would not exclude that it could have happened in any case. This is because the evaluation of a vignette is always affected to a certain extent by the normative context in which it takes places. For men in our sample, the second vignette represented a situation where justifying the husband’s request could mean to appear as male chauvinist or as an attempt to profit of the wife’s disadvantaged position due to unemployment. Therefore, compared to the opposite situation, men lowered their fairness judgments a lot. Thanks to the experimental manipulation, however, this did not prevent to detect an effect of the previous division of housework on the legitimacy of the renegotiation request.
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APPENDIX
Sample descriptives
Male
Female
Age
Less than secondary educ.
Upper seconday educ.
University educ.
Monthly net income
Mean/ % Std. Dev.
47,7
52,3
41,9
18,0
45,3
36,7
1746,4
5,4
892,8
Min
19
500
Max
63
5000
30

Weekly work hours
Traditional gender attitudes scale
Wife's % of housework
N
38,7
2,5
68,5
770
11,8
0,8
16,3 0
6
1
98
5
100
Gender ideology scale
Items used to measure respondents’ attitudinal gender ideology (5-point Likert scale):

A woman has to have children in order to be fulfilled

If a woman earns more than her partner, it is not good for the relationship

If parents divorce it is better for the child to stay with the mother than with the father

A pre-school child is likely to suffer if his/her mother has a full-time job

When parents are in need, daughters should take more caring responsibility than sons

A man has to have children in order to be fulfilled

A woman should be willing to devote less time to paid work for the sake of the family
31

TABLES AND GRAPHS
Table 1 Analysis of variance of vignette 1: fairness evaluation of the division of housework
Model
Wife's % of housework
Wife's relative hours of paid work
Wife's contribution to family income
Children at home
Wife's % of housework*wife's relative hours of paid work
Wife's % of housework*wife's contribution to family income
R's behavioural gender ideology
Model 1 Model 2
Mean of
Squares d.f. F Sign.
22459,6 15 59,7 0,000
Mean of
Squares
20192,8 d.f.
17
F
54,8
Mean of
Sign. Squares
0,000
137082,8 2 364,38 0,000 138540,1 2 375,7 0,000
20106,7
134547,9
Model 3 d.f.
17
2
F
54,3
363,0
Sign.
0,000
0,000
30203,7
1200,4
849,0
1250,8
24,3 4
2
2
1
4
80,28
3,19
2,26
3,32
0,06
0,000
0,042
0,134
0,010
0,992
30147,0
1186,0
841,8
1158,5
853,1
2
2
1
4
2
81,8
3,2
2,3
3,1
2,3
0,000
0,041
0,131
0,014
0,100
30142,9
910,1
889,3
1123,6
2
2
1
4
81,3
2,5
2,4
3,0
0,000
0,087
0,122
0,017
32

R's behavioural gender ideology*share of housework
R's attitudinal gender ideology
R's attitudinal gender ideology*share of housework
Residual 376,2 753
Total
Adj R squared
807,5 768
0,53
Root MSE
N
19,40
769
Source
Model
1155,6 4
368,7 751
807,5 768
0,54
19,20
769
3,1 0,014
Table 2 Analysis of variance of vignette 2: renegotiating of the division of housework
1714,2
390,5
2
4
370,7 751
807,5 768
0,54
19,2
769,0
4,6
1,1
0,010
0,379
Model 1
Mean of
Squares d.f.
Model 2 Model 3 Model 4
Mean of Mean of Mean of
F Sign. Squares d.f. F Sign. Squares d.f. F Sign. Squares d.f.
111,9 5 21,0 0,000 89,4 7 17,0 0,000 61,9 11 11,9 0,000
F Sign.
52,0 13 10,0 0,000
33

Sex (who becomes unemployed: husband/wife)
Previous share of housework
Children at home
R's sex
R's sex*sex (who becomes unemployed)
R' behavioural gender ideology
R's behavioural gender ideology* sex (who becomes unemployed)
R's attitudinal gender ideology
R's attitudinal gender ideology* sex (who becomes unemployed)
Residual 5,3 764
Total
Adj R-squared
Root MSE
N
6,0 769
0,12
2,31
770
138,2 1 25,9 0,000
193,3 2 36,3 0,000
10,7 2 2,0 0,135
5,3 762
6,0 769
0,13
2,29
770
146,8 1 28,0 0,000
188,8 2 36,0 0,000
10,9 2 2,1 0,127
13,6 1 2,6 0,108
52,5 1 10,0 0,002
144,8 1 27,8 0,000
182,8 2 35,1 0,000
11,2 2 2,2 0,117
12,3 1 2,4 0,125
52,7 1 10,1 0,002
9,8 2 1,9 0,154
18,0 2 3,5 0,032
5,2 758
6,0 769
0,13
2,28
770
147,9 1 28,3 0,000
191,0 2 36,5 0,000
9,2 2 1,8 0,174
12,2 1 2,3 0,128
48,1 1 9,2 0,003
0,13
2,29
770
6,0 769
2,6 2 0,5 0,606
11,7 4 2,23 0,064
5,2 756
34

Graph 1 Fairness scores by wife’s contributions to paid and unpaid work (means and 95% c.i.)
Fairness ratings by wife's contributions (means and c.i.)
Unfair to
Husband
100
76 76
57
55
51
Fair to both 50
38
34
20
13
Unfair to
Wife 0
10h less the same 10h more wife's hours of paid work relative to husband wife's % of housework: 20% wife's % of housework: 50% wife's % of housework: 80%
Graph 2 Fairness scores by respondents’ behavioural gender ideology and vignette’s division of housework (means and 95% c.i.)
Unfair to
Husband
100
69
68 68
50 51
Fair to both
50
44
25 26
18
Unfair to
Wife 0 egalitarian collaborative
R's behavioural gender ideology traditional wife's % of housework: 20% wife's % of housework: 50% wife's % of housework: 80%
35

Graph 3 Justifiability scores by respondents’ sex, vignette’s sex and share of housework
(means and 95% c.i.)
Is the renegotiation of housework justified?
6
5
4
3
2
1
10
9
8
7
9,2
9,0
8,3
7,9
7,4
7,0
9,2
8,2
8,7
6,8
7,8
6,4 most of the chores about half a little part of the chores most of the chores about half a little part of the chores women's answers men's answers
Previous share of housework of the vignette subject who asks to renegotiate
Husband unempl./ wife asks Wife unempl./ husband asks
Graph 4 Justifiability scores by respondents’ attitudinal gender ideology, respondents’ sex, and vignette’s sex (means and 95% c.i.)
Is the renegotiation of housework justified?
10
9
8
7
6
5
4
3
2
1
8,6
7,4
8,1 8,1 8,1
8,4
8,8
7,0
8,8
6,9 egalitarian transitional traditional egalitarian transitional
Women's answers Men's answers
R's attitudinal gender ideology
Husband unempl./ wife asks Wife unempl./ husband asks
36
8,4
7,6 traditional

Graph 5 Justifiability scores by respondents’ behavioural gender ideology, respondents’ sex, and vignette’s sex (means and 95% c.i.)
Is the renegotiation of housework justified?
10
9
8
7
6
5
4
3
2
1
9,1
7,7 egalitarian
8,0
7,9
7,8
8,3
8,8
7,2
8,5
6,7 collaborative traditional egalitarian collaborative
Women's answers Men's answers
R's beahvioural gender ideology
Husband unempl./ wife asks Wife unempl./ husband asks
8,7
7,6 traditional
37