New research from the University of Technology Sydney shows that relative wages aren’t the driving force behind who does the bulk of the household chores and childcare – gender and social norms are the likely explanation.

The traditional economic view about why couples divvy up work by gender, first proposed by Nobel Prize winning economist Gary Becker about 50 years ago, was that it made good economic sense. Becker’s theory proposed that couples divided their labour because it was more efficient – in the same way that a country might specialise in producing a specific good such as timber or oil, to create a competitive advantage.

Women, because they give birth and breastfeed, focus on domestic work, leaving men to focus on work outside the home and bring home the bacon. However, the role of men and women in contemporary society is changing rapidly, so does this theory still have merit?

To test whether “comparative advantage” influences how couples divide housework, economists Professor Peter Siminski and Rhiannon Yetsenga from the University of Technology Sydney examined data from the HILDA survey of Australian households, which tracks wages and time-use in the home.

The study, Specialization, Comparative Advantage, and the Sexual Division of Labor, was published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Labour Economics. It reveals that more than 75 per cent of heterosexual couples continue to divide their labour based on traditional gender roles.

“It was a difficult theory to test, partly because we can’t measure productivity in the home, but we can observe productivity in paid work – the hourly wage of each partner,” says Professor Siminski.

“Many women have a higher wage than their male partners, but the HILDA data shows they usually still do more housework than their partner, and less paid work.”

By comparing wages with time-use in the home, the researchers estimate that a woman’s hourly wage would need to be 109 times higher than her male partner’s wage before reaching equality in domestic work.

They note that this provocative figure is based on an extrapolation from patterns in the actual data, highlighting that hourly wages have almost no relationship with how couples share their domestic work.