Whose gender ideology matters? A dyadic analysis of gender ideology and housework time in the United Kingdom Open Access

Despite long-term progress towards gender equality in the public sphere, such as women's increased education and labour force participation, progress towards gender equality has been slow and limited in the domestic sphere, as reflected in an uneven and stalled gender revolution (England, 2010; Goldscheider, Bernhardt and Lappegård, 2015). As a result, the division of unpaid domestic labour remains gendered in many societies, with women carrying out a disproportionately large share of housework and care labour (Hu and Yucel, 2018; Kan and Kolpashnikova, 2021; Lachance-Grzela and Bouchard, 2010). Enduring gender inequalities in the domestic realm are attributable to various structural constraints. Particularly, the persistence of traditional gender norms in society is frequently cited as a key factor that perpetuates the gender division of housework through enforcing and reinforcing gendered perceptions and responses to the structural conditions of family life (Kan and Kolpashnikova, 2021).

To date, there has been a substantial body of research showing that traditional gender ideology is positively associated with women's and negatively associated with men's housework time (Aassve, Fuochi and Mencarini, 2014; Carlson and Lynch, 2013; Kan and Kolpashnikova, 2021; Lachance-Grzela and Bouchard, 2010; Lewin-Epstein, Stier and Braun, 2006). As an important predictor of housework, gender ideology shapes what is considered acceptable for men and women in terms of domestic responsibilities and how individuals perceive and enact expected gender roles within the household (Carlson and Lynch, 2013; Davis and Greenstein, 2009). The formation of gender ideology and its manifestation in domestic labour are closely embedded in and influenced by social structures through relational processes, including interactions between family members. However, most existing research tends to treat gender ideology as an individual characteristic, paying relatively scarce attention to interactional processes in which spouses’ gender ideologies may interact with each other and jointly shape their housework participation.

This study adopts a relational perspective to examine how both spouses’ gender ideologies relate to their housework time and how the patterns vary with the spouses’ relative income. Highlighting the impact of interactions within couple dyads on the formation and enactment of gender ideologies (Carlson and Lynch, 2013; Greenstein, 1996), the relational perspective emphasises the crucial role of social interactions in mediating and embodying the structural conditions of family life under which couples negotiate their housework division (Elder, 1998; Wang and Li, 2022). Relational interactions not only help communicate societal expectations regarding gender roles but also mediate the ways in which individuals internalise and enact these expectations in everyday family life. Within the context of housework, a person's willingness to engage in or delegate housework tasks can be influenced by their spouse's ideology, the distribution of power within the relationship and mutual expectations based on societal norms (Evertsson, 2014; Nisic and Trübner, 2023). The negotiation of housework duties between spouses, therefore, reflects a complex interplay of individual gender ideologies shaped through relational interactions.

To develop a systematic understanding of the relational dynamics between gender ideology and housework time, this study analyses longitudinal dyadic data from the United Kingdom, spanning 1993–2020, using the actor–partner interdependence model (APIM). The APIM is a statistical approach designed to explore how individuals within a dyadic relationship, such as couples, exert mutual influences on each other. Accounting for the interdependent nature of dyadic data, it facilitates the analysis of dynamics both within and between dyads (Kenny, Kashy and Cook, 2006). The APIM has enjoyed broad application in previous research on housework and working time (Nisic and Trübner, 2023; Stertz, Grether and Wiese, 2017; Trübner, 2022). In this study, we focus on housework (rather than childcare), which is widely recognised as a routine site of gender inequality regardless of parenthood status (Davis and Greenstein, 2013).

We address three sets of research questions in this study. First, building on the APIM approach, we disentangle how an individual's housework time within a couple dyad relates to their own (actor effects) and their spouse's (partner effects) gender ideologies, as well as how the strengths of these gender ideology–housework associations differ by gender. Second, given that housework allocation is a relational process, we further examine how both spouses’ housework hours relate to the interaction between their gender ideologies. Here, we pay particular attention to the scenarios in which spouses’ gender ideologies (dis)align with each other. Third, we investigate how the relationship between both spouses’ gender ideologies and their housework hours varies with the spouses’ relative income (Aassve, Fuochi and Mencarini, 2014; Brines, 1994). In answering these questions, our analyses shed light on how the ideational and material configurations of couple relationships intersect to shape domestic gender inequality.

In different-sex couples, gender ideology has been widely recognised as a key factor shaping gendered housework participation. A key component of gender ideology is people's perceptions and expectations about the appropriate roles of men and women in the labour market and at home (Davis and Greenstein, 2009). The development of gender ideology and its behavioural enactment in domestic labour are closely embedded in and shaped by social structures (Davis and Greenstein, 2009; Lachance-Grzela and Bouchard, 2010; Wang, 2019). From an early age, individuals are socialised into gender-specific roles through family, education and broader social interactions, which establish expectations for gender-appropriate behaviours in family life (Carlson and Lynch, 2013). These ideologies are further consolidated by law, policies and workplace practices that institutionalise gender norms. For example, economic structures, such as gender, pay gaps and occupational gender segregation, help reinforce traditional gender ideology and buttress men's role as breadwinner and women's role as homemaker (Brinton and Lee, 2016; Pedulla and Thébaud, 2015).

Extensive empirical research shows that gender ideology not only affects people's housework participation directly but also indirectly affects housework allocation through influencing their labour market status, income and time availability (Carlson and Lynch, 2013; Davis and Greenstein, 2009). Across many countries, traditional gender ideology is associated with longer housework hours for women and shorter housework hours for men, whereas egalitarian gender ideology is associated with a more gender-equal division of domestic labour, whereby women spend less time and men spend more time on housework (Aassve, Fuochi and Mencarini, 2014; Kan and Kolpashnikova, 2021; Lachance-Grzela and Bouchard, 2010). However, some studies reported a gender asymmetry in the relationship between gender ideology and housework. In Germany and Israel, for example, women with egalitarian gender ideology spend significantly less time on housework than their traditional counterparts, but gender ideology bears little association with men's housework (Lewin-Epstein, Stier and Braun, 2006). Similarly, in Canada, gender ideology is a more important predictor of women's than of men's housework time (Gazso-Windle and McMullin, 2003).

Despite a consensus that housework allocation is a relational process in which spouses negotiate their housework contributions (Daminger, 2020; Nisic and Trübner, 2023; Wang and Cheng, 2023), most existing research tends to examine gender ideology as an individual characteristic, while paying insufficient attention to interactional processes within couple dyads (Greenstein, 1996). Against this backdrop, individual-level analyses insufficiently consider couple-level dynamics in housework allocation. To remedy this limitation, we adopt a dyadic approach to understanding how spouses’ housework participation is jointly configured by both spouses’ gender ideologies, while accounting for the interrelations between spouses’ housework time and their gender ideologies.

Drawing on the ‘linked lives’ perspective, this study departs from an individual-level focus to adopt a dyadic approach, emphasising interactions and interdependence between spouses (Elder, 1998; Moen and Yu, 2000). A dyadic approach underlines the embeddedness of an individual's life within the lives of other family members and argues that the events and experiences of one family member could immediately affect other family members, and vice versa (Elder, 1998). Such crossover effects may be particularly pronounced between spouses who cooperate intensely in household tasks at close quarters. Indeed, research provides ample evidence regarding how conjugal interactions and influences can shape both spouses’ outcomes (Daminger, 2020; Minnotte et al., 2010; Nisic and Trübner, 2023). This underscores the need for a relational, dyadic approach that accounts for both spouses’ gender ideologies when examining their housework participation.

Conceptually, the relational perspective is well grounded in gender theories, which have long emphasised the interactional construction of gender (Risman, 2018) and argued that in couple relationships, spouses relationally negotiate their housework participation based on their economic resources, cultural beliefs and time availability (Evertsson, 2014; Greenstein, 1996; Kan et al., 2022). In this relational framework, housework becomes not just a chore but also a means through which gender roles are fulfilled, contested and potentially redefined. Each spouse's approach to household tasks is thus seen as an expression of their internalised gender norms within the dynamics and structural conditions of their relationship. The relational perspective provides a valuable lens for understanding the (re)construction of gender in family life (Davis and Greenstein, 2013; Nisic and Trübner, 2023). It recognises that individuals’ ideologies and behaviours are embedded within a web of social relationships and interactions. A dyadic approach, therefore, underscores the importance of considering both individual and interactive processes in addressing gender disparities in household labour (Stertz, Grether and Wiese, 2017; Wang and Cheng, 2023).

Empirically, to better understand the relational dynamics between gender ideology and housework time, this study analyses dyadic data using the APIM. This approach allows us to empirically investigate mutual influence processes, shedding light on the interplay between spouses’ ideologies and behaviours. Going beyond individual-level analyses that treat each spouse as isolated, such an approach allows us to understand how societal expectations and norms are embraced or contested within couple relationships (Nisic and Trübner, 2023; Wang and Cheng, 2023). It thus promises to provide deeper insights into mechanisms such as crossover influences between spouses underlying their gendered housework participation and the role of their gender ideologies therein (Stertz, Grether and Wiese, 2017).

To date, very few studies have explicitly distinguished between the gender ideologies of the husband and the wife, considered their interrelations and examined how they interactively relate to each spouse's housework time. As one of the few exceptions, Greenstein's (1996) cross-sectional study analysed the interactive effects between the husband's and the wife's gender ideologies on housework allocation in the United States, showing that husbands with traditional gender ideology undertook little housework regardless of their wives’ gender ideology and that husbands did more housework only when both spouses held relatively egalitarian gender ideologies. More recently, Nitsche and Grunow (2016) proposed the notion of ideology pairing to examine how spouses’ gender ideology pairings within couples affect their division of childcare in Germany. They found that fathers’ contributions to childcare are facilitated by spouses’ alignment in egalitarian gender ideology and by the mother's large contribution to the couple's income. These findings highlight that a relational view of spouses’ both ideological and economic pairings is crucial to understanding their childcare division. Their work provides a promising direction for studying the gender division of housework through a relational lens.

Given the very limited dyadic analysis in previous research, our study aims to disentangle the actor and partner effects of both spouses’ gender ideologies on their housework time using the APIM (Gistelinck and Loeys, 2019; Kenny, Kashy and Cook, 2006; Vowels and Mark, 2020). In the APIM, the actor effect refers to the effect of the husband's or the wife's gender ideology on their own housework time, and the partner effect refers to the effect of one's gender ideology on one's spouse's housework time (Kenny and Ledermann, 2010).

Traditional gender ideology obliges women rather than men to shoulder the lion's share of housework—a prediction that has received wide empirical support (Davis and Greenstein, 2009; Evertsson, 2014; Lachance-Grzela and Bouchard, 2010). According to the notion of  ‘doing gender’ (West and Zimmerman, 1987), gender is (re)produced through the enactment of gendered behaviours (e.g., housework) that are socially constructed and deemed ‘gender-appropriate’. The feminisation of housework, especially routine chores, such as cooking and cleaning, imposes the normative pressure on women to shoulder the lion's share of domestic responsibilities, while deterring men from such responsibilities in safeguarding their sense of masculinity (Quadlin and Doan, 2018; Starrels, 1994; Thébaud, 2010). When an individual holds more traditional gender beliefs and expects their spouse to conform to traditional gender roles, it can create pressure on their spouse to fulfil the expectation (Li et al., 2020; Minnotte et al., 2010). We sum up these considerations in the following hypotheses:

We further expect to see gender differences in the susceptibility of individuals’ housework time to their own and their spouses’ gender ideologies. Despite the de-traditionalisation of gender ideology throughout the gender revolution, men lag behind women in adapting their housework behaviours to the new norm of gender egalitarianism (Sullivan, Gershuny and Robinson, 2018). Indeed, long-term evidence shows a notable decrease in women's housework time but only a slight increase in men's housework time over the past decades (Altintas and Sullivan, 2016). These insights suggest that progress towards egalitarian gender ideology has played a powerful role in reconfiguring women's rather than men's housework time. We thus expect that the wife's housework time is more susceptible to both spouses’ gender ideologies than the husband's housework time, as specified in Hypothesis 1C. As we unpack this gender difference, we argue that Hypothesis 1C is further grounded in the micro-foundation of power asymmetry between women and men in couple relationships. Given structural gender inequalities (e.g., more favourable labour market conditions for men) in the United Kingdom (Lu et al., 2023; Wang and Lu, 2022), the husband tends to possess greater power than the wife. This may mean that a wife's gender ideology has a more limited influence on her husband's housework time than on her own housework time. Conversely, given men's advantageous power position, their traditional gender ideology may play a more prominent role in increasing their wives’ housework time than in reducing their already low housework contribution (Greenstein, 1996). These considerations are summed up in Hypothesis 1D.

Given that housework allocation is a relational process involving both spouses, it is important to consider the interaction and particularly (dis)alignment between spouses’ gender ideologies (Greenstein, 1996; Kenny, Kashy and Cook, 2006; Kenny and Ledermann, 2010). When spouses similarly hold traditional or egalitarian gender ideology, the alignment enables them to validate each other's ideology and support the translation of such ideology into housework behaviour more fully. For example, husbands with traditional gender ideology may expect their wives to take on the lion's share of housework, and wives subscribing to traditional gender ideology are likely to fulfil such expectations. By contrast, when spouses’ gender ideologies disalign with each other, such disalignment may impede each spouse from fully realising their traditional or egalitarian gender ideology. For example, wives with egalitarian gender ideology may be able to enact such ideology in behaviour only if their husbands share the egalitarian ideology and step up with their housework contributions (Evertsson, 2014; Greenstein, 1996). In this case, spouses may compromise and meet in the middle, and their traditional and egalitarian ideologies may neutralise each other.

Building on spousal reinforcement in the case of ideological alignment, we expect to see interaction effects between both spouses’ traditional gender ideologies on their housework time. Specifically, for spouses who share traditional gender ideology, wives tend to have multiplicatively longer housework hours and husbands tend to have multiplicatively shorter housework hours compared to their counterparts who do not align with their spouses in traditional gender ideology. Conversely, when spouses share egalitarian gender ideology, the patterns would be reversed. However, should spousal neutralisation exist in the case of ideological disalignment, we expect that the husband and the wife will meet somewhere in between their respective ideals, with their housework hours falling between those of their counterparts aligned in egalitarian and in traditional gender ideologies. Using the APIM terms, we specify Hypotheses 2A and 2B as follows:

The translation of gender ideology into gendered housework behaviour may be further configured by relational dynamics in spouses’ command of economic resources. Although Gupta's (2007) autonomy theory focuses on how individuals’ economic resources (e.g., absolute income) directly influence their housework participation, we choose to focus on relative income given our primary interest in within-couple relational dynamics (Brines, 1994; Kan, 2008).

According to the economic dependence and relative resource perspectives, the relative income between spouses plays a key role in shaping their checks and balances of power, and the spouse making a greater contribution to the couple's income tends to command a greater amount of power (Brines, 1994; Mannino and Deutsch, 2007). A key premise of the relative resource perspective is that people tend to view housework as an unpleasant task and would prefer to avoid it (Kan, 2008). Thus, one's greater relative contribution to the couple's income may confer one with greater power to bargain or exchange one's way out of housework (Aassve, Fuochi and Mencarini, 2014; Hu, 2019). Often overlooked in this economic model, however, is the implicit but untested assumption that power derived from relative income configures housework time by shaping each spouse's ability to translate their gender ideology into housework behaviours.

For husbands, their high relative income may reflect and reinforce traditional gender roles (Aassve, Fuochi and Mencarini, 2014; Brines, 1994), and the power conferred by their high relative income may bolster their ability to translate their traditional gender ideology into a reduction in their own and an increase in their wives’ housework time. For wives, a low relative income and economic dependence on their husbands may undercut their bargaining power (Brines, 1994; Bittman et al., 2003; Lachance-Grzela and Bouchard, 2010), which in turn undermines their ability to translate their egalitarian gender ideology into a reduction in their own and an increase in their husbands’ housework time. Building on these considerations, we expect husbands’ larger rather than smaller contribution to the couple's income to bolster the effects of both spouses’ traditional (vs. egalitarian) gender ideology on their own and their spouses’ housework time, as in Hypothesis 3A:

While Hypothesis 3A draws on the relative resource perspective, a counter-scenario, building on the ‘doing gender’ perspective (West and Zimmerman, 1987), may be possible. Traditionally, a notable gender asymmetry exists in the economic roles of women and men, with the social construction of men's rather than women's gender identity being firmly anchored in their economic activities (Álvarez and Miles-Touya, 2019). This gender asymmetry persists to date, given women's experiences of gender discrimination and wage penalties and men's comparative advantages in the labour market (Correll, Benard and Paik, 2007). Against this backdrop, gender deviance neutralisation theory posits that as men earn less than their wives, they tend to do less housework to neutralise their deviance from men's normative economic role. This means that when men have a lower rather than a higher relative income, they may be more likely to stick to traditional gender ideology in housework to reclaim a sense of masculinity (Davis and Greenstein, 2009; Kan, 2008). Conversely, when women earn more than their husbands, they may increase their housework participation. This behaviour serves to counterbalance their deviance from gender norms and maintain their husbands’ sense of masculinity (Greenstein, 2000). However, it is important to note that previous research has reported mixed findings on gender deviance neutralisation, suggesting that the theory's validity depends on socio-economic and cultural contexts (Amarante, Rossel and Scalese, 2023; Hook, 2017; Simister, 2014; Sullivan, 2011). Should gender deviance neutralisation play a more important role than resource bargaining/exchange in shaping how relative income moderates the actor and partner effects of both spouses’ gender ideologies on their housework time, we would expect Hypothesis 3B to hold:

The data analysed in this study are from the British Household Panel Study (BHPS) Waves 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 15 and 17 and the United Kingdom Household Longitudinal Study (UKHLS) Waves 2, 4 and 10. The harmonised BHPS and UKHLS data cover the time span of 1993–2020 and contain consistent measures of gender ideology and housework time. In its first wave in 1991, the BHPS surveyed a nationally representative sample of more than 10,000 individuals from approximately 5,500 households in Great Britain using a stratified and clustered sampling design. The BHPS interviewed the same households in each subsequent year and added an additional sample from Northern Ireland in 2001 (Institute for Social and Economic Research [ISER], 2022). In 2009, the BHPS was replaced by the UKHLS, which is seen as a continuation of the BHPS. It has a similar design but a much larger sample size, including more than 50,000 individuals from approximately 30,000 households in its first wave (ISER, 2022). The University of Essex Ethics Committee has approved all data collection.

To construct our analytical sample, we first restricted the sample to cohabiting different-sex couples in a married or unmarried cohabiting relationship. We then reshaped the data from a person-wave to a couple-wave format. Next, we restricted the sample to couples in which both spouses were aged between 25 and 59 years (i.e., the active working age). As key information, such as gender ideology, was collected only by a self-completion questionnaire covering a representative subsample of respondents, we limited our sample to those who completed the self-completion questionnaire. After listwise-deleting a small number of observations with missing values (5.9% of the sample), the final analytical sample contains 36,137 couple-wave observations for 14,043 couples. See Supplementary Table S1 for further details about the analytical sample construction. The BHPS/UKHLS constructed weights to account for complex survey design, unequal attrition and non-responses (ISER, 2022). Because the weights were constructed at the individual rather than the couple level, we conducted our analyses without weighting.

The dependent variable measures each spouse's weekly housework hours. The survey asked the question, ‘How many hours do you spend on housework in an average week, such as time spent cooking, cleaning and doing the laundry?’ We top-coded the responses at the 99th percentile within gender to reduce the influence of outlier cases. While research has highlighted childcare as a key area where gender inequality persists, we emphasise the continuing importance of examining housework not only because it is a routine site of gender inequality regardless of parenthood status but also because housework is essential to the everyday subsistence of home life (Davis and Greenstein, 2013).

Our key explanatory variable is each spouse's gender ideology. The survey asked respondents the extent to which they agreed or disagreed with the following statements: ‘a pre-school child is likely to suffer if his or her mother works’; ‘all in all, family life suffers when the woman has a full-time job’; and ‘a husband's job is to earn money; a wife's job is to look after the home and family’. Responses were recorded using a 5-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (strongly agree) to 5 (strongly disagree). Given the high internal consistency among the three items and that the items load more or less evenly on one factor (Cronbach's alpha = 0.80; eigenvalue of principal component analysis = 2.13), we reverse-coded the three items and calculated a standardised average score across the full sample of both wives and husbands to yield our gender ideology index, with a higher score indicating more traditional ideology. Standardising the index facilitates the interpretation and comparison of coefficients across models.

Our key moderating variable is spouses’ relative income. We measured the husband's contribution to the couple's total income, calculated based on both spouses’ monthly gross income before tax and other deductions. While net income tends to vary with people's pension and tax arrangements, gross income provides a good indicator of individuals’ earning power (Hu, 2019).

We controlled for a range of time-constant and time-varying socio-demographic variables that may confound the relationship between gender ideology and housework time (Hu, 2019; Hu and Yucel, 2018; Wang and Coulter, 2019; Zhou, 2017). Specifically, we included each spouse's age, long-standing illness (no vs. yes) and race (white vs. non-white); the couple's marital status (married vs. unmarried cohabitation); the age of the youngest child in the household (0 for those without children); and the number of residential children aged under 16 years (no, one, two and three or more). Given the well-documented role of socio-economic status and paid work in shaping both gender ideology and housework participation (Aassve, Fuochi and Mencarini, 2014; Hu, 2019), we included both spouses’ education (non-tertiary vs. tertiary), the total number of hours each spouse worked per week measured in a similar way as one's housework hours (top-coded at the 99th percentile within gender), the couple's homeownership status (no vs. yes) and logged monthly gross household income. We also controlled for survey waves and the four nations of the United Kingdom (England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland). Table 1 presents the descriptive statistics for all variables used in our analysis.

We used the APIM to examine the dyadic dynamics between spouses’ gender ideologies and housework time (Gistelinck and Loeys, 2019; Kenny, Kashy and Cook, 2006; Vowels and Mark, 2020). The APIM considers within-couple correlations inherent in dyadic data, enabling analysis that captures dynamics both within and across dyads. This approach is especially valuable in research examining scenarios in which the ideology or behaviour of one partner can influence and be influenced by that of the other partner. Specifically, the APIM estimates two types of effects. The actor effect captures the relationship between an individual's characteristics (i.e., gender ideology) and their own outcome variable (i.e., housework time). The partner effect captures the relationship between one's partner's characteristics and one's outcome variable. The APIM also accounts for the correlations between two partners’ predictor and outcome variables, which ensures the correct identification of actor and partner effects (Kenny, Kashy and Cook, 2006).

To implement the APIM, we used Stata version 17 to estimate generalised structural equation models with random intercepts for each spouse's housework time and clustered standard errors at the couple level, accounting for the panel data structure (i.e., couple-waves are nested within couples). As gender ideology varied little within individuals (coefficient of within-person variation = 0.15), we used a random-effects (rather than a fixed-effects) specification. We fitted the models in three steps. First, we examined the actor and partner effects of both spouses’ gender ideologies on their housework time and used Wald tests to compare the effect sizes of the actor and partner effects. Second, we estimated the interaction effects between spouses’ gender ideologies to investigate the relationship between spouses’ (dis)alignment in gender ideology and their housework time. Finally, we estimated the interaction effects between a couple's relative income and each spouse's gender ideology.

Table 1 presents the descriptive statistics for the subsamples of husbands and wives. Overall, we find that wives spend approximately 16 hours on housework per week, which is significantly more time than their husbands’ weekly housework time of approximately 6 hours (p < 0.001). In terms of individual characteristics, husbands are generally older, less likely to have a tertiary education degree and less likely to have any long-standing illness but have similar ethnic compositions compared to their wives (p < 0.001 for gender differences for all these variables, except ethnicity). Compared with their wives, the husbands spend around 10 hours more on paid work per week (p < 0.001). At the couple level, approximately 82% of the couple-wave observations are in married as opposed to in unmarried cohabiting relationships, and around 44% are childless. Approximately 80% of the observations own their dwellings. On average, the husbands make a greater contribution (i.e., 60%) to the couple's total income. Finally, most of the observations are from England (70%), with another 10%, 13% and 7% from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, respectively.

We conducted further analyses to compare the actor and partner effects of wives’ versus husbands’ gender ideologies (see Supplementary Table S2 for full comparison results). The results support Hypothesis 1C that compared with the husband's housework time, the wife's housework time is more closely associated with and thus more susceptible to both spouses’ gender ideologies (p < 0.001). Additionally, for the wife's gender ideology, the actor effect (on her own housework time) is larger than the partner effect (on her husband's housework time) (p < 0.001). By contrast, for the husband's gender ideology, the partner effect (on his wife's housework time) is larger than the actor effect (on his own housework time) (p < 0.001). The results thus support Hypothesis 1D that wives’ gender ideologies are more closely associated with their own than with their spouses’ housework time, whereas husbands’ gender ideologies are more closely linked to their spouses’ than to their own housework time.

Further tests show that when spouses’ gender ideologies do not align, the differences in spouses’ predicted housework time between the two types of disalignment (i.e., ‘husband traditional + wife egalitarian’ vs. ‘wife traditional + husband egalitarian’) are not statistically significant at the 5% level. However, it is worth noting that irrespective of the combination of spouses’ gender ideologies, the gender gaps in housework time between the husband and the wife are consistently wide. Even when both spouses have egalitarian gender ideology, the wife's housework time is still around 8 hours longer per week than her husband's.

Table 3 examines how the association between each spouse's gender ideology and housework time varies with the relative economic power between spouses measured by the husband's contribution to the couple's income. Specifically, for the husband's housework time, the interaction effect of neither spouse's gender ideology with the husband's relative income is statistically significant at the 5% level. By contrast, for the wife's housework time, the interactions of both the wife's (B = 0.84, p < 0.05) and the husband's gender ideologies (B = 1.22, p < 0.001) with relative income are statistically significant.

We conducted a series of supplementary analyses to ensure the robustness of our results. First, we tested whether our results may be driven by sample selection based on couples’ gender ideologies. As shown in Supplementary Table S5, we conducted t-tests to compare gender ideology pairings between separated and ongoing couples but did not find any statistically significant differences. Moreover, the correlation between couples’ gender ideology pairings and relationship duration is close to zero. In Supplementary Tables S6 and S7, analyses show that our main results are robust to controlling for relationship duration and limiting the sample to only one randomly selected observation for each couple (to avoid oversampling couples who stayed together for longer), respectively.

Second, we tested additional income measures. As previous research shows that the relationship between relative income and spouses’ housework time may be non-linear (Bittman et al., 2003; Brines, 1994), we tested potential non-linearity by including the quadratic term of the husband's relative income in Supplementary Table S8, which yielded results that are consistent with our main findings. Furthermore, autonomy theory suggests that women's housework time may be affected by their own absolute income rather than by the couple's relative income (Gupta, 2007; Killewald and Gough, 2010). Thus, we tested the interaction between gender ideology and each spouse's individual income in Supplementary Table S9. The results suggest that individual income also plays a crucial role in moderating the actor effect of gender ideology on wives’ housework time, which is not surprising, as women's individual and relative earnings are closely correlated.

Third, we conducted two tests regarding the measure of gender ideology. As gender ideology is a multidimensional construct, we tested whether our main results would change were we to use a single item which specifically captures ideology pertaining to the gender division of labour (‘a husband's job is to earn money; a wife's job is to look after the home and family’). As Supplementary Table S10 shows, the results are substantively consistent with our main findings. In Supplementary Table S11, we included lagged gender ideology measures (T − 1) as the key predictors such that the temporal ordering of gender ideology precedes housework time, yielding findings largely consistent with those reported in the article.

Fourth, we explored potential heterogeneities across distinct historical periods and key demographic groups. Supplementary Table S12 shows that the associations between both spouses’ gender ideologies and their housework hours are substantively consistent before (1993–2009) and under (2010–2020) the Coalition/Conservative regime. It is worth noting that the negative interaction between wives’ gender ideology and the 2010–2020 period dummy is statistically significant (p < 0.01), indicating a reduced association between women's gender ideology and their housework time in this period compared to before. Next, Supplementary Table S13 examines whether the actor and partner effects of gender ideology vary with spouses’ parenthood status (Panel A) and the age of the youngest child in the household (Panel B). The results in both panels are substantively consistent with those from our main analyses, but the positive effects of both wives’ and husbands’ traditional gender ideologies on wives’ housework time are stronger when the couples have young (aged 0–11 years) children in the household.

Finally, as the random-effects specification in the APIM cannot distinguish between within- and between-couple variation, we estimated hybrid models to disentangle whether our results are driven by within- or between-couple differences in Supplementary Tables S14 (main effects) and S15 (interaction effects). Both tables show that our main conclusions are driven primarily by between-couple differences, which is consistent with our expectation, as gender ideology has relatively small within-couple variation. However, in Supplementary Table S14, we do find that changes in housework time also varied with within-spouse changes in gender ideologies (apart from the within-effect of husbands’ gender ideology on their own housework time) in the same directions as the main results.

This study contributes to the literature by systematically conceptualising and investigating how both spouses’ gender ideologies and their interplay with relative income shape gendered housework time in different-sex couples. Using dyadic data from the United Kingdom (1993–2020) and the APIM, our study has yielded three important findings.

First, by explicitly distinguishing and comparing actor and partner effects of each spouse's gender ideology, this study provides a nuanced understanding of the relative importance of both spouses’ gender ideologies in shaping their housework participation. The findings show that the wife's traditional gender ideology has a positive actor effect (on her own housework time) and a negative partner effect (on her husband's housework time), and the patterns are reversed for the husband's ideology. By going beyond an individual-centred focus and considering the crossover effects between spouses, our findings reveal the intricate interdependencies between spouses’ gender ideologies and housework participation within a couple, providing valuable insights into dyadic dynamics of gendered behaviours (Elder, 1998; Moen and Yu, 2000).

More specifically, our findings show that wives’ gender ideologies are more closely associated with their own than with their husbands’ housework time, whereas husbands’ gender ideologies are more closely linked to their wives’ than to their own housework time. As a result, compared with the husband's housework time, the wife's housework time is much more closely related to both spouses’ gender ideologies. These findings align with long-term evidence showing a notable decrease in women's housework time but only a slight increase in men's housework time alongside an overall de-traditionalisation of gender ideology over time (Altintas and Sullivan, 2016). This may be because prevailing gender ideologies clearly inform and closely regulate women's housework behaviours, but they only loosely specify and regulate men's domestic responsibilities. The findings point towards a potential gender asymmetry in the construct of gender ideology pertaining to domestic labour and the importance of this asymmetry in understanding domestic gender inequality. Given that women's housework time is similarly influenced by both their own and their husbands’ ideologies, it is crucial to focus on shifting men's gender ideology towards a more egalitarian direction, as promoting more egalitarian gender ideology among men could help alleviate women's housework burden. Nevertheless, as men's housework time is far less susceptible to variations in both spouses’ gender ideologies compared to women's housework time, it is insufficient to just ‘de-traditionalise’ gender ideology, as it is currently constructed, to achieve domestic gender equality. Rather, we need structural changes in such ideologies to emphasise men's domestic responsibilities equally and clearly.

Second, by exploring the implications of the interaction of spouses’ gender ideologies, particularly spouses’ ideological (dis)alignment, for their housework time, we find that wives tend to have the shortest housework time in couples who align in egalitarian gender ideology, followed by ideologically disaligned couples, and have the longest housework time in couples who align in traditional ideology—and the patterns are reversed for husbands. These results lend support to Risman's (2004) conceptualisation of gender as a relational construct by emphasising the interactive nature of gender ideologies. The findings demonstrate that spouses’ gender ideologies can reinforce or offset each other depending on the (dis)alignment of the ideologies (Aassve, Fuochi and Mencarini, 2014; Lachance-Grzela and Bouchard, 2010). Specifically, spouses’ alignment in traditional or egalitarian gender ideology enables conjugal validation and support for translating such ideology into housework behaviour, whereas disalignment hinders the full translation of spouses’ discrepant ideologies.

Nevertheless, it is worth noting that husbands’ housework time seems relatively inelastic across distinct ideology pairings. Even when both spouses align in egalitarian gender ideology, the wife's housework time is much longer than that of her husband, indicating a gender asymmetry in the translation of gender ideology into behaviour. This may reflect the inherently gendered construct of housework (Gershuny, 1994) and a lack of behavioural enactment of expressed egalitarian gender ideology, particularly on the part of men. This ideology–behaviour gap could also reflect a discrepancy between men's inherent and often unconscious endorsement of traditional gender values regarding domestic labour and their expression of support for gender egalitarianism, possibly due to an increasing social pressure to support gender equality in public discourse (Davis and Greenstein, 2009). In light of Daminger's (2020) findings, the lack of variation in men's housework time with both spouses’ gender ideologies could also be because gender-egalitarian men adopt a ‘de-gendering’ logic, whereby they focus on a gender-neutral process of dividing housework rather than equality as an outcome in the actual division of housework. Our findings thus suggest that to achieve domestic gender equality, we need men to not only ‘say’ but also ‘do’ gender egalitarianism, and that process-focused gender equality, as observed by Daminger (2020), is insufficient.

Third, building on and going beyond existing resource theories (Kan, 2008; Nitsche and Grunow, 2016), our findings show that spouses’ relative income helps shape spouses’ housework participation by configuring the translation of gender ideology into such participation. We find that the husband's high relative income bolsters the positive association between both spouses’ traditional gender ideologies and the wife's housework time. This may be because husbands’ high relative earnings reflect traditional economic arrangements in the family, which reinforces wives’ adherence to traditional gender ideology in the enactment of housework behaviour (Aassve, Fuochi and Mencarini, 2014). Alternatively, husbands’ high relative earnings may entail unequal power dynamics between spouses. In this case, men's monopoly of power derived from their relative resources may compel their wives to conform to traditional gender norms and spend more time on housework (Lachance-Grzela and Bouchard, 2010). These potential mechanisms highlight the complex role played by material conditions in conveying gender structures and in preventing women from translating egalitarian gender ideology into gender-egalitarian housework participation. In this sense, we need to remove structural and economic barriers to enable women to ‘do’ gender egalitarianism. Although previous research highlights men's economic hegemony underlying their lack of housework contributions (Aassve, Fuochi and Mencarini, 2014; Brines, 1994), our findings show that the husband's relative income does not influence how gender ideology translates into men's housework behaviour. This may be due to the ‘structural double standards’ that allow men to derive power both from economic resources when they have comparative economic advantages and from (patriarchal) cultural norms to ‘do’ masculinity by doing less housework when their relative earnings are low.

Our study has a few limitations, which could be potential directions for future research. First, whereas the APIM considers interdependent relationships between spouses, it does not readily allow for the identification of causal relationships. The relationship between gender ideology and housework time could potentially be bi-directional (Carlson and Lynch, 2013). Whereas gender ideology could be an exogenous cultural trait influencing housework time, gendered housework participation may shape gender ideology. We encourage future research to delve deeper into potential causal mechanisms. Second, this study focuses only on housework time, as the survey has not consistently collected time-use data on other types of household labour, especially childcare tasks, such as feeding children and supervising their educational activities. Future research could collect and analyse data on a wider range of domestic activities to provide a more comprehensive understanding of the implications of gender ideology for domestic gender inequalities. Third, although work–family roles are a crucial component of gender ideology, different aspects of gender ideology exist (Knight and Brinton, 2017). Future research employing more detailed measures of gender ideology can provide a more nuanced understanding of how different aspects of gender ideology relate to housework participation.

Despite these limitations, our study contributes to the literature by demonstrating the value of considering interactional dimensions of gender ideology in couple relationships. Our findings facilitate a deeper understanding of the housework distribution process under distinct conditions of gender ideology (dis)alignment and relative economic power between spouses. They demonstrate that the translation of gender ideology into gendered housework behaviour is an interactional process and that this process is further configured by the material conditions in the family.

No AI tools were used in the writing of this paper.

Data are available at https://www.understandingsociety.ac.uk/. Codes are available upon request.

The authors have declared they have no competing interests.

Not applicable because of the use of secondary data.

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1162/euso_a_00010.