The Great Convergence? Gender and Unpaid Work in Europe and the United States

Over the past decades, men’s and women’s time use has changed dramatically suggesting a
gender revolution across industrialized nations. Women increased their time in paid work and
reduced time in unpaid activities. Men increased their time in unpaid work, but not enough to
compensate. Thus, women still perform more unpaid work irrespective of context. We
investigate developments regarding men’s and women’s unpaid work across Europe and the
United States, using time diary data from the mid-1980s and onwards. We find evidence for
gender convergence in unpaid work over time, but different trends for housework and
childcare. Gender convergence in housework was primarily a result from women reducing
their time, whereas childcare time increased for both genders only supporting convergence in
contexts where men changed more than women. Decomposition analyses show that trends in
housework and childcare are generally explained by changes in behaviour rather than
compositional changes in population characteristics.