A number of studies published in the 1970s asserted that the amount of time women spend doing housework shows no historical decline. This article draws on evidence from time-budget surveys--three from the United States (1965, 1975, and 1985) and three from the United Kingdom (1961, 1974, and 1984)--to investigate the evolution of housework time for men and women over the last three decades. Clearly much other than housework has changed over this period. More women have paid jobs, more men are unemployed, and families have gotten smaller on average. Even having controlled for such sociodemographic changes, we conclude that in the two countries, women in the 1980s do substantially less housework than those in equivalent circumstances in the 1960s, and that men do a little more than they did (although still much less than women). These changes correspond closely to developments in four other countries (Canada, Holland, Denmark, and Norway) for which historical time-budget evidence is available.

Recently much attention has been focused on whether the gender transformation of paid and unpaid work in society referred to as the gender revolution has hit a wall, or at least stalled. In this article, we discuss key trends in the gender division of labor across 13 developed countries over a 50‐year period. These trends show little decisive evidence for a stall but rather a continuing, if uneven, long‐term trend in the direction of greater gender equality. We set out a theoretical framework for understanding slow change in the division of unpaid work and care (lagged generational change). We argue that, through a long‐term view of the processes of change, this framework can help address why progress in the convergence in paid and unpaid work promised by the gender revolution has been so slow.

What is the long‐term effect of the emerging predominance of the dual‐earner family? This study uses data from 3 national household panel surveys—the British Household Panel Survey (N= 16,044), the German Socioeconomic Panel (N= 14,164), and the U.S. Panel Study of Income Dynamics (N = 7,423)—which provide, for the first time, clear and direct longitudinal evidence of change in the balance of domestic labor within couples: evidence that women make large adjustments in their domestic work time immediately upon entering full‐time paid work and that men exhibit a less obvious pattern of lagged adaptation, showing larger increases in domestic work in successive years.

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Sociology 45(2) 234-251Abstract Cross-national trends in paid and unpaid work time over the last 40 years reveal a slow and incomplete convergence of women's and men's work patterns. A simplistic extrapolation would indicate a 70-80 year process of gender convergence, with the year 2010 representing an approximate mid-point. However, in conformity with the expectations of gender theory, time use data show that gender segregation in domestic work is quite persistent over time. Women still do the bulk of routine housework and caring for family members while men have increased their contributions disproportionately to non-routine domestic work, suggesting that gender ideologies and the associated 'doing' of gender in interaction remain important features of the division of domestic labour. The effects of institutional barriers are also apparent, with differential changes in women's proportional contribution to routine housework and caring activities related to different national policy clusters.