BACKGROUNDAttitudes toward gender roles are one of the factors that have received most attention in the literature on housework division. Nevertheless, egalitarian attitudes often do not match egalitarian domestic behaviors. OBJECTIVEThe paper's central hypothesis is that women's ability to assert their egalitarian beliefs is linked to having sufficient personal resources in economic and cultural terms. METHODSWe use the 2013-2014 Italian time-use survey (N = 7,707 couples) and analyze how relative resources and women's education moderate the relationship between gender ideology and housework division. RESULTSConsistent with our hypothesis, for a woman, the effect of gender ideology is strongest when she earns roughly as much or more than her partner and when she holds a college degree. When the woman's income is lower than the man's, the effect of women's gender ideology is quite small. If the woman does not have a degree, her egalitarian attitudes will not translate into her doing less housework. CONCLUSIONSGender ideology matters, but a solid bargaining position is needed in order to put it into practice. Social policies promoting gender equality in education and the labor market can increase women's capacity for translating egalitarian attitudes into actual behavior. CONTRIBUTIONThis paper's original contribution is in analyzing whether and how relative resources and education influence the effect of gender ideology on the division of housework. Carriero & Todesco: Housework division and gender ideology: When do attitudes really matter? 1040 http://www.demographic-research.orgMoreover, our analysis goes beyond most existing studies in its rare combination of behavior measures collected through a reliable time-use diary procedure and information regarding partners' gender ideology.

A long-standing theoretical tradition underlines the importance of comparison referents for fairness evaluation, i.e., people, experiences and expectations that individuals choose to compare with their own situation. However, few studies on perceived fairness of housework division have measured and tested comparison referents, partly because of the lack of suitable data. Moreover, findings were sometimes mixed because small convenience samples were used. Previous literature also neglected the distortive effects of self-serving bias in the choice of referents. This study, conducted in an Italian context, seeks to overcome these limitations by using a probabilistic sample and two different designs: a survey data analysis and an experimental-vignette technique which avoids the distortions of self-serving bias. The survey's findings reveal that the effects of comparison referents are strong and in line with expectations, though limited to the domestic behavior of male referents. Moreover, unfavorable comparisons have a stronger effect on perceived fairness than favorable ones. The vignette analysis indicates that comparison referents affect perceived housework fairness even if the effect of self-serving bias is controlled for.

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Family, Italy, Divorce, Marital dissolution, Children,

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