Housework, income and days of the week

The significant gender gaps in time dedicated to housework -well documented for developed countries- are even higher for Latin America countries (Amarante and Rossel, 2018). This represents a large constraint on women’s possibilities of holding full time quality jobs, conditioning the development paths for the region. Despite intrahousehold decisions about housework time being relevant to understand gender gaps in paid work, which are one of the most salient characteristics of Latin American labor markets (see Gasparini and Marchionni, 2015), studies about this topic are scarce in the region.
At the international level, the literature has pointed individual earnings as a crucial factor to understand time devoted to housework and gender gaps in housework within households. The resource based framework has proposed that a bargaining process takes place and the one that has more resources dedicates less to housework. This process of bargaining has been questioned by an argument that underlines the importance of absolute resources (income) to determine time devoted to housework. More recently, the importance of differentiating by day of the week came into the discussion; new evidence for developed countries has shown that the strong relationship between resources and housework tended to fade on weekends (Gupta& Sayer, 2015; Hook, 2017; Kolpashnikova &Kan (2019).
For Latin American countries, studies about the links between earnings and housework are scarce, whereas - up to our knowledge- there are no studies about time use in weekdays and weekends. In this article, we address this relationship, analyzing separately the behavior of women and men on weekdays and weekends. Based on time use surveys for four Latin American countries (Chile, Ecuador, Mexico and Peru), we investigate cross sectional differential patterns on housework for heterosexual cohabiting couples aged 25-64, considering the importance of relative and absolute earnings both on weekdays and weekends.