Egalitarian Relationships

Egalitarian relationships are those in which partners equally share all benefits, burdens, and responsibilities. Although, in theory, the notion of an egalitarian relationship could apply to any dyadic relationship, such as friend, sibling, or coworker, research has focused primarily on married men and women. No good estimates of the percentage of egalitarian marriages exist, but it is widely agreed that gender inequality is the norm in married couples. Egalitarian relationships are in the minority. The purpose of this entry is to define egalitarian relationships, to discuss the hypotheses that account for them, and to foretell their future.

Egalitarian relationships are found among couples of varying class backgrounds, albeit in different forms. An egalitarian college professor and dentist might work together to get their kids up, dressed, fed, and off to school; alternate after-school pickups; and share the evening cooking and cleanup, homework help, and bedtime routines. They might rely on some paid household labor. An equally sharing nursing assistant and carpenter, however, are less likely to hire household help, and chances are that they would be among the many dual-earner couples who work different shifts and alternate caring for their children.

Shared power and shared domestic labor are two key aspects of egalitarian marriage. Studies of decision-making power in marriage typically find that husbands and wives whose incomes are relatively similar are more likely than are other couples to have equal say in important decisions. Husbands and wives in egalitarian relationships vary in the extent to which they equally divide the same tasks or specialize in particular tasks, but time in domestic labor is shared equally as is the onerousness of the tasks assumed.

Three hypotheses have spawned a large body of research on the predictors of the division of family labor: relative resources, time availability, and gender ideology.

The relative resource hypothesis starts from the assumption that housework and childcare are unpleasant burdens, which married partners try to avoid. The partner with relatively more resources will use them to negotiate a relatively smaller share of household labor. The time availability hypothesis posits that the distribution of domestic labor reflects who has the time to do the work; the more time either spouse spends in the labor force, the less time she or he will contribute to housework and childcare and the more the spouse will do. The gender ideology approach argues that beliefs about gender equality shape the division of domestic labor; the more husbands and wives believe that men and women should have similar roles in paid work and at home, the more they will share housework and childcare.

Each of these hypotheses has garnered some support, but has also been challenged. For example, income is indisputably a resource associated with a smaller share of household labor, but education is sometimes associated with men doing a larger share of domestic labor, the opposite of what would be predicted if education were used to bargain oneself out of domestic work. The time availability hypothesis begs the question of how decisions are made to allocate each spouse's labor to the market. The biggest problem of all three approaches is that they ignore that gender itself affects each of these proposed influences on the division of family labor. Income may buy spouses out of housework, but in most American families, the reality is that each dollar a woman earns tends to buy less time off than each dollar a man earns. Likewise, time availability for household work depends on gender. Given the same paid work hours, women do more domestic labor than men do. As for gender ideology, some studies show that the division of household labor is more equal when men believe in equality but not when women do. Perhaps most problematic, even when husbands and wives earn equal incomes, spend equal time in the labor force, and believe in gender equality, the division of household labor is still usually unequal.

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