2024/10/25 by Florian Schulz · 1 voice
Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Health Professions · Social Sciences · #European Socioeconomic and Political Studies #Social and Demographic Issues in Germany #Work-Family Balance Challenges
paper · pdf · doi:10.31235/osf.io/t68dy
openalex publication_date 2024/10/25 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/14
This study provides a comprehensive descriptive account of trends in the gendered division of unpaid labor in Germany over three decades, drawing on all four waves of the German Time Use Study (1991/1992, 2001/2002, 2012/2013, and 2022). Using a sample of coupled women and men aged 25–64, the analysis reports trends in total, core, and occasional housework time for weekdays and weekends separately, assesses key determinants, decomposes changes into compositional and behavioral components, and compares trends in West and East Germany. The overall picture is one of substantial but incomplete gender convergence. Women’s total weekday housework time declined by about 35 percent, from 237 to 153 minutes per day, while men’s remained largely stable in aggregate. Beneath the aggregate, two divergent trends are at work: men’s core housework time more than doubled on weekdays, while their occasional housework time declined. The gender ratio in core housework fell from 6.88 to 2.49, which translates into a reduction of more than 60 percent. Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition analyses show that the majority of the change on both sides remains unexplained by compositional shifts, pointing to normative and behavioral change as the primary driver, particularly for men. The West-East comparison reveals a second convergence alongside the gender convergence: regional differences have largely dissolved by 2022. For the parent subsample, childcare time increased markedly for both mothers and fathers, with fathers' time more than doubling, and these increases are almost entirely unexplained by compositional change, making childcare the most normatively dynamic domain in the study.