Husbands' participation in domestic labor: Interactive effects of wives' and husbands' gender ideologies

The literature suggests that gender ideology-how a person identifies herself or himself in terms of marital and family roles traditionally linked to gender-is related to the division of labor in the home. In this article I assert that it is not sufficient to merely examine the main effects of wives' and husbands' gender ideologies. Rather it is essential to consider rite interaction between the ideologies of wives and their husbands in order to understand how a division of household labor emerges. I hypothesize that a husband's gender ideology will not be related to the division of household labor for men married to traditional wives, but that it will be for men with egalitarian wives. An empirical test using data provided by 2,719 married couples from the National Survey of Families and Households confirms this hypothesis. Even after controlling for measures of market- and marital-specific capital, wives' and husbands' gender ideologies interact in terms of their effects on the division of household labor. Husbands do relatively little domestic labor unless both they and their wives are relatively egalitarian in their beliefs about gender and marital roles.