10/24/2008
Sabino Kornrich, Ph.D. candidate, University of Washington
Monday, October 27, 2008
12 pm - 1:30 pm
Condon 311
Hiring Help for the Home: Women's Income and Outsourcing Household Labor,
1980-2000
Abstract:
A common assumption in both popular and scholarly accounts is that recent
decades have seen an intensification in the commercialization of family
life. Scholars expect that households increasingly rely on market services
to supplement and supplant their own labor because of increases in women's
bargaining power, changes in norms about the use of services, and
increased earnings. I use longitudinal data on Americans' spending habits
from 1980 to 2000 to examine whether spending on services has increased
and how earnings and the share of earnings provided by women influence
spending over time among dual-earner households with children. These data
show that, surprisingly, there has been little change in the level of
spending on outsourcing over the past 20 years. However, results show that
while in 1980 households where women out-earned men often purchased
replacements for households labor, in 2000 these households no longer
spent as heavily as other couples on services replacing caring labor. I
suggest that a potential explanation is a transformation in the bargaining
process: men now participate in caring labor, reducing somewhat the need
for outsourcing these activities.
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