Measuring Gender Norms in Domestic Work: A Comparison between Homosexual and Heterosexual Couples

URL des Documents de travail : https://centredeconomiesorbonne.cnrs.fr/publications/Documents de travail du Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne 2020.01 - ISSN : 1955-611XWomen throughout the world still do most of the unpaid domestic work. To reveal the impact of social norms beside traditional economic variables on the sharing of household tasks within couples, we choose to compare the sharing of tasks between heterosexual and homosexual couples in France based on econometric estimations. The results show that, other things being equal, heterosexual couples share tasks much more unequally than homosexual couples. Assuming that the behavior of same-sex couples is not affected by gendered social norms, we then propose a measure of the impact of these norms using a Blinder-Oaxaca type decomposition