16/06/2026

Noa de la Vega

Max Weber Fellow

"Men, Housework, and Culture"

Abstract

This paper is co-authored with Libertad González. Despite the dramatic rise in female labor force participation, the gender gap in domestic work persists, reflecting an asymmetry between women's market work and the reallocation of housework. Applying the epidemiological approach to immigrant households in Spain, we study how cultural heritage shapes the allocation of housework. Drawing on the 2018 Spanish Fertility Survey, we link both partners' origin-country housework norms to couples' housework allocation and document three findings. First, while the shared cultural housework norms strongly predict housework allocation in same-origin couples, in mixed-origin couples it is strongly predicted by the female partner's norms, while the male partner's lose their predictive power entirely. Second, this asymmetry is domain-specific: for employment outcomes, both partners' origin-country norms matter symmetrically, suggesting that market and domestic work are governed by distinct cultural logics. Third, a decomposition analysis reveals that more traditional female-origin norms operate at the internal margin, shifting a larger share of housework onto women, whereas more traditional male-origin norms operate at the external margin, reducing the outsourcing of domestic work.

For past presentations, click here.