Domestic services are purchased to alleviate time demands in the home. Outsourcing is substituting market goods and services for one's own labor (Bittman, Matheson and Meagher 1999). Just as firms outsource accounting or janitorial functions to independent contractors, so do households buy substitutes for their members' labor. Outsourced alternatives are produced in the industrial sector (e.g., take-out dinners) and the service sector (e.g., nannies, carpet cleaners, personal tax accountants). In the United States where housekeeping and childcare services are often provided by undocumented Latina immigrants (HondagneuSotelo 2001), these jobs are typically unregulated by formal rules and contracts and characterized by low pay rates. Given the increase in dual-earner families (McLanahan and Casper 1995), domestic outsourcing is an adaptive strategy for families that have high disposable incomes to purchase services, but less discretionary time for housework (Treas 1987). As an alternative to housewifery, domestic services may explain why women devote less time to housework than in the 1960s (Bianchi et al. 2000). Research shows that married couples use services in response to competing time demands of home and work (Bellante and Foster 1984; Brayfield 1995;Cohen 1998;Hanson and Ooms 1991;Oropesa 1993;Soberon-Ferrer and Dardis 1991). Reporting on cleaning, cooking and childcare that fall mostly to women, studies have neglected expenditures on "male" chores around the house.Women do most of the housework (Blair and Lichter 1991), but outsourcing studies display little gender theorizing (but see Oropesa, 1993, andVan Dijk andSiegers, 1996). By offsetting structural barriers to gender equality, purchased services help married women to compete in the labor market. Outsourcing household work diminishes the demands of women's "second shift" at home (Hochschild 1989). Cohabiting women may also benefit from outsourcing, but the expenditures of cohabitors and married couples may differ. Compared to married people, cohabitors do less housework, and both partners do more paid work -consistent with their egalitarian views of gender (Coltrane 2000). As another incentive to outsource, singles face gender-specific labor shortages in the home because they lack a partner to handle chores generally assigned to the other gender. This study investigates how spending on "gender-typed" domestic tasks in the United States varies by living arrangements (i.e., household differences in gender composition). This is, to our knowledge, the first study to use expenditure data to study the gendering of domestic outsourcing. Because there is little theorizing on how outsourcing varies by household type, we extrapolate from the literature on the household division of labor to develop hypotheses about domestic service spending. Admittedly, expenditures are a rough measure of outsourcing because they do not distinguish between the quantity and quality of the domestic good or service purchased. A data set containing information about 1,114 Dutch hous...

The aim of this contribution is to refine explanations for inequalities in the amount of time men and women spend in paid work and housework by breaking down institutional conditions into economic circumstances, policy conditions, and cultural influences. We indicate our expectations for these macro indicators as well as for their interaction with micro level indicators. We expect, for example, that the negative effect on paid work for married women becomes stronger in more masculine countries. Using the Multinational Time Use Archive, we analyzed 17 countries in the 1965-1998 period. Multilevel analyses show the importance of institutional conditions for paid work: men and women in highly developed economies and in countries with high rates of child care facilities do more paid work, although they spend less time on paid work after having children. With respect to the influence of culture, it appears that highly educated and married women in masculine cultures do less paid work, and that married women also do more housework, than their counterparts in more feminine cultures.

This article addresses the issue of domestic outsourcing. We view outsourcing decisions as the result of utility-maximizing behavior on the part of households. Earlier studies have shown that households with more time constraints, the most common reason for outsourcing, do not always outsource more. To account for these unexpected empirical ®ndings, we provide a new explanation for outsourcing decisions that focuses on trust problems associated with outsourcing household and caring tasks. Trust problems are related to the competence, values, and possibilities as well as incentives for opportunism on the part of the supplier of the product or service. Using insights from the transaction cost approach, new hypotheses are formulated on the in¯uence of the problem potential on the make-or-buy decision (whether or not to outsource a task). The embeddedness of the supplier is introduced as a way to generate trust, thus decreasing the problem potential.

The increased participation of women in paid labor has changed the organization of domestic work. This article deals with a strategy to cope with remaining domestic duties; to what extent are domestic tasks outsourced, what are the main determinants, and does it indeed save time spent on housework? Five outsourcing options are investigated: domestic help, take-out meals, the microwave, the dishwasher, and the dryer. Hypotheses are formulated with respect to household resources, time availability, demand, and adaptability to new appliances. These hypotheses (except the adaptability hypothesis) assume that outsourcing saves time. This underlying assumption is tested as well. Using time budget data of the Dutch population in 1995, results show that especially households with higher incomes and double earners more often make use of all kinds of outsourcing options. Furthermore, the domestic help as well as the dishwasher saves time for women, whereas the microwave is time saving for men.

Despite the rise in women’s paid employment, little is known about how women and their partners allocate money to outsource domestic tasks, especially in unmarried unions. Tobit analyses of 6,170 married and cohabiting couples in the 1998 Consumer Expenditure Survey test hypotheses that recognize gender inequality between partners, gender typing of household tasks, and differences between cohabitation and marriage. Women’s earned income is more important than men’s for spending on female tasks. Men’s earnings are not more important for male tasks, but the earnings of married men are more strongly linked to expenditures on female tasks than are the earnings of cohabiting men. The research indicates that working women leverage their earnings to reduce their domestic burden through outsourcing.