Does More Egalitarian Ideology, Foster More Egalitarian Household Work Division? Marriage, Work and Family Life in Japan

There is accumulating and strong empirical evidence that a gender egalitarian ideology of the partners is related to a more egalitarian share of housework among couples. Recent research also points out that gender ideology itself may not be stable among individuals over time. However, there is little evidence on the changes in gender and family attitudes in non-Western contexts. Using data from 25 waves (1993–2017) of the Japanese Panel Survey of Consumers (JPSC), we construct fixed-effects models that reveal how women’s gender attitudes, together with life events just as parenthood and women’s employment, shape unpaid work distribution in Japanese couples. The findings reveal that the change in wife’s gender ideology does not have a significant effect on increasing the husband’s share of domestic work over the course of the relationship. However, the interaction effect with parenthood is statistically significant. For couples without children, the more egalitarian attitudes wife has, the higher the husband's share of housework/childcare. However, for couples with children, there is no significant relationship between women’s gender role attitudes and the husband’s share of housework/childcare. It suggests that, once a couple has a child, the husband becomes unresponsive to the wife’s gender-role attitude, even if the wife’s working conditions or the wife’s share of income do not change after the birth.