Although the primacy of household responsibilities in determining gender differences in labor market outcomes is universally recognized, there has been little investigation of the direct effect of housework on wages. Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, cross-sectional wage regressions reveal a substantial negative relation between wages and housework for wives, which persists in specifications controlling for individual fixed effects. The evidence for husbands is inconclusive. Married women’s housework time is, on average, three times that of married men s. The addition of housework time to the wage equations increases the explained component of the gender wage gap from 27-30 percent to 38 percent.

Joni Hersch is a professor of economics at the University of Wyoming in Laramie. Leslie S. Stratton is an assistant professor of economics at the University of Arizona in Tucson. Partial funding for Hersch was provided by NSF Grant #HRD-9250117. The authors thank the referees, Ron Oaxaca, Tony Tam, and participants at the 1995 WEA meeting and the 1994 National Bureau of Economic Research Summer Institute for their helpful comments. The data used in this article can be obtained beginning in August 1997 through July 2000 from Joni Hersch, Department of Economics, University of Wyoming, Laramie WY 82071.