The Effect Of Housework On Wages And Male-Female Wage Differential

Gender wage differential in labor market is a common phenomenon in the labor market around the world. It also has always been one of the main subjects of labor economics. At present, the issue of gender wage differential in labor market has been studied extensively from the angle of human capital and discrimination by domestic scholars. They attributed the remaining unexplained part of the wage gap to the labor market discrimination against women. In contrast to most of the existing literature, this study tries to analyze and investigate the important role of housework in explaining the male-female wage differential. In a broad economic sense, household activities require effort and time and it limits the time elasticity of market activity, which decreases labor market productivity and thus wages. Furthermore, more time spent engaged in housework, workers with less time spent in human capital investments and accumulations would have shorter employment spells and are more likely to have discontinuous working lives. Using data from China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS), cross-sectional wage regressions reveal that housework has no effect on wages for single workers. But we find a substantial negative relation between wages and housework for married women, which persist in specifications controlling for unobserved heterogeneity. The evidence for marred men is inconclusive. The addition of housework time to the wage equations increases the explained component of the gender wage gap from43.22%to50.89%.