Does Socioeconomic Status Buy Time out of Housework and Care Work? an Analysis of Urban Married Brazilian Women By Educational Level and Relative Income Level

The aim of this paper is to analyze absolute (whether one does or does not) and load (weekly hours) of housework and care work differentials among urban married Brazilian women older than 25 years according to educational achievement and relative income level in 2022. Relative income places each household or individual in a given point of the distribution using the median as parameter. In regard to educational achievement, there are four categories and as for relative income, there are three strata. I also analyze the interactions between these two variables. Tellingly, preliminary results of the analysis of aggregate absolute number of married women (did or did not housework and care work) point to small differences between educational achievement categories and relative income strata. Thus, this article will delve into the analysis of the eight different types of housework the data set provides as well as the total number of hours aggregately dedicated to housework and care work. There are important intervening factors that must be considered, especially family type and size, women’s working situation, race/ethnicity, and age – age is taken as a mere control variable, but it deserves more care and attention as indicator of birth cohorts and thus of generational differences. I estimate relative risk measures and indicators of association for 2 by 2 tables to address the binary relationship by categories of educational attainment and relative income level. Secondly, to expand the previous analysis, I employ logistic binomial regression to integrate the relevant factors mentioned and assess their net association of the response variable. Finally, I employ a hurdle model to gauge these variables’ influence on the reported hours of housework and care work in the survey’s week of reference. The hypothesis is that the differences are in the housework details, but not in the housework forest.