Women continue to undertake substantially more unpaid labour than men, with the gaps closing if women bring economic resources to the household, spend time in paid work, or both partners hold egalitarian gender-role attitudes. Some attention has been given to how these patterns vary across ethnic groups, but the research is sparse and dominated by US studies. We examine the relationships between gender, ethnicity and housework supply within heterosexual couples in Australia using longitudinal data and individual-and couple-level panel regression models. We find large and statistically significant ethnic differences in gender divisions of household labour in Australia, with particularly egalitarian arrangements within Indigenous couples. These results have implications for understanding the processes underlying gender divisions of household labour, and highlight important, previously unknown, issues in Indigenous family processes. Particularly, our findings constitute first-time evidence of positive gender-equality outcomes for this subpopulation and call for further research on this topic.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.