Domestic Division of Labour and Marital Satisfaction in China

This paper analyses data of the Chinese Women’s Status Survey 2000, a national survey in China, to examine the association between housework participation and marital satisfaction in urban and rural families. Married women’s housework time is 2.8 times of that of married men. Yet their level of marital satisfaction is on a par with men’s. We hypothesize that this is partly due to gender difference in the preference about domestic roles versus work roles. We first test if housework time forms a less negative association with marital satisfaction for women than for men (i.e. Do women dislike housework less than men?). We also test if work time has a stronger negative relationship with women’s level of satisfaction than men’s (i.e. Do women dislike paid work more than men?). Furthermore, we test whether elderly parents’ help in housework mainly alleviate women’s domestic burden rather than men’s. We find supportive findings for these hypotheses in our preliminary analyses. We will employ Structural Equation Modelling to investigate the patterns of associations among different forms of marital satisfaction (including satisfaction with the domestic division of labour, satisfaction with marital life, and satisfaction with status in the family), the domestic division of labour and co-residence living arrangement with elderly parents.