This article assesses the relative explanatory value of the resource‐bargaining perspective and the doing‐gender approach for the division of housework in the United States and Sweden from the mid‐1970s to 2000. The data used are the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) and the Swedish Level of Living Survey. Overall results show that housework was truly gendered work in both countries during the entire period. Even so, the results indicate that, unlike Swedish women, U.S. women seem to increase their time spent in housework when their husbands are to some extent economically dependent on them, as if to neutralize the presumed gender deviance on the part of their spouses.

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We use the Swedish Young Adult Panel Study to study spouses’ gender ideology and women’s and men’s division of routine housework and child care. The results show that men with an egalitarian gender ideology spend 1 hour more in housework per week than do other men and that their spouses spend approximately 2 hours less in housework than do other women. Women’s gender ideology, in contrast, only seems to influence women’s own time spent in housework (and not their spouses’). Couples wherein the woman and/or the man have a strong egalitarian ideology display a more gender-equal division of child care. Equality in child care and housework are linked and men spend more time in housework when they live in a family with a gender-equal division of child care. In sum, an articulated gender consciousness is a prerequisite for a gender-equal division of unpaid work, even in gender-egalitarian Sweden.

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