Marriage and Division of Family Responsibilities: Evidence from a Local Italian Study

The dramatic redistribution of paid work between men and women that has occurred in Western countries during recent decades has not been followed by a substantial redistribution of unpaid family work. This inconsistency has puzzled scholars for years, leading to a large strand of research, but clear solutions have proven elusive so far. This matter is a prominent issue in marriage, since it has been shown that the division of unpaid family work strongly impacts marital quality and, in turn, marital stability. In Italy, however, scant scholarly attention has been devoted to this topic, partly because of the lack of adequate data. The aim of this chapter is to add a new piece of evidence on the Italian case, testing two competing hypothesis deriving from different theoretical frameworks which provide predictions about the division of unpaid family work, namely the relative resource perspective and the gender attitudes perspective. This chapter is based on a dataset consisting of 773 dual-earner married couples with at least one child up to 12 years old. The dataset is confined to four provinces (Turin, Cuneo, Novara, Alessandria) in Piedmont, a large region located in the north-west of Italy. The local dimension of the dataset is counterbalanced by its richness in terms of information. Empirical analysis was carried out using ordinary least squares regression models. The findings give only modest and qualified support to the relative resource perspective, while gender attitudes appear to be a reliable predictor of the division of unpaid family work, although the magnitude of the effects is sometimes modest.