The sexual division of labor within households revisited : comparisons of couples and roommates

Becker’s theories of labor-market specialization predict that couples will allocate the time of the man mainly to the labor market and the time of the woman mainly to the home market. Previous studies fail to find evidence to support this allocation of labor. We compare cohabiting couples to roommates to study the extent to which couples specialize. Roommates make an interesting comparison group. Like couples, they live together. Unlike couples, they have no incentives to specialize with respect to labor-market traits. We include same-sex couples in our study because by definition, they are unable to specialize by gender. Couples, however, have incentives to pool household resources and to specialize. We find evidence consistent with the hypothesis that, with respect to earnings, couples specialize and roommates do not. With respect to hours worked, however, same-sex couples are indistinguishable from male and female roommates.