Download or read book Cohort Differences in the Gender Division of Household Labor in Urban China written by Zhe Zhang and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 53 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Abstract: China has undergone tremendous social changes in gender roles in the past decades. According to census data, China's employment rate for working-age women not only fell from 77.4 percent in 1990 to a new low of 60.8 percent in 2010, it was also 20.3 percentage points lower than that of men in 2010. Similarly, a 2010 survey by the All-China Women's Federation and National Bureau of Statistics shows that the proportion of Chinese men and women believing that "men belong in public, women belong at home" has increased over the past decade. One unaddressed question is whether these changes are reflected in the gender division of household labor in urban China. Using data from the 2006 China Health and Nutrition Survey, I examine differences in wives and husbands' total housework time and time spent on specific household tasks among cohorts from three different reform periods. The analysis compares housework participation among 402 couples in the Cultural-Revolution cohort, 430 couples in the Gradualist-Reform cohort and 107 couples in the Radical-Reform cohort. Husbands in the Cultural-Revolution cohort spend more time on housework than the two reform cohorts. There are no cohort differences among wives and the gender gap in housework time is only significant in the task of food buying and clothes washing, but not in the total housework time. The adoption of a less equal gender ideology might be driving husbands' decreasing housework participation in the reform cohorts.