Housework task hierarchies in 32 countries

This paper examines participation in female-typed household tasks by husbands in 32 countries in the 2002 International Social Survey Program. Mokken scaling shows widespread and systematic ordering of married men’s performance of stereotypically female tasks, a hierarchy which is obscured by conventional measures of couples’ task-sharing. The hierarchy gives rise to a typology of men’s conformity to the social conventions of this task hierarchy. Multilevel, multinomial models test hypotheses on the micro-level predictors of husbands’ pattern of housework participation, as well as expectations for country differences