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Midwest Social Sciences Journal

ORCID

ORCID 0000-0001-6033-9426

Abstract

This study investigated the incidence of families’ outsourced household labor overall and for five different tasks in 41 countries using cross-national data from the 2012 International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) Family and Changing Gender Roles Module IV, as well as measures of country-level gender and class-based inequality appended from the United Nations Development Programme, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and the World Bank. The findings suggested that outsourcing was more of an exception than a norm, with only about 12 percent of families in the data reporting outsourcing any task. Although there was variation in rates of outsourcing overall across countries, small repairs and cleaning were the most frequently outsourced tasks across the majority of countries. Unexpectedly, outsourcing was more common in less egalitarian countries relative to gender. This finding may suggest that where women cannot renegotiate household labor with their partners, outsourcing might be a more feasible strategy for reducing housework loads. Further and as anticipated, outsourcing was more common in less egalitarian countries relative to measures of class-based inequality. Class-based inequality may provide the conditions under which outsourcing household labor is feasible – with both a low-skill, domestic workforce on one end and families with financial resources to pay for help on the other. I concluded with suggestions for future research, focusing on what questions remain for quantitative and qualitative investigations.

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