Care in Context: Men's Unpaid Work in Advanced Industrialized Countries

Jennifer L. Hook, University of Washington

Cross-national and temporal variations in men's unpaid work allow observation of men's behavior under varying gender contracts, providing leverage on explanations of men's unpaid work behavior. I use multilevel models to investigate individual- and state-level predictors of men's unpaid work, utilizing 37 surveys from 20 countries (spanning 1965 to 1998) archived in the Multinational Time Use Survey datasets. I include measures of demand and availability at the individual-level, and measures of women's labor force involvement and policy context at the state-level. I find considerable variation in effects of individual-level variables across countries. At the macro-level, women's labor force involvement and policies encouraging men's family participation increase men's unpaid work time, and policies supporting working women decrease men's time. Results help explain the varied impact of women's labor force participation on men's unpaid time, and have potential implications for policies addressing gender equality, fatherhood, work/family conflict, and very low fertility.