Psychological Perspectives on Gender Deviance Neutralization

The gendered division of housework has interested social and behavioral scientists for half a century, starting as early as 1960 with Blood and Wolfe’s Husbands and Wives. This interest was instigated by the increased participation of women in the paid labor force and the fact that those changes did not lead to parallel changes in the division of housework. Women still do a much larger share of the housework than men do, regardless of their employment status, both in the United States (for reviews, see Bianchi & Milkie, 2010; Coltrane, 2000) and in Western Europe (for a review, see Kluwer & Mikula, 2002). Although the amount of time men invest in housework has risen over the past decades, it is not enough to compensate for women’s increased labor-force participation. It is not surprising that the fundamental question in this large area of research has consistently been, why does housework remain women’s work? Oriel Sullivan’s (2011) article ‘‘An End to Gender Display Through the Performance of Housework?’’ in this volume provides a compelling critique of the evidence for the gender-deviance-neutralization hypothesis that posits that men and women who have nonstereotypical roles in their household, as when the husband earns less than his wife, display their gender through respectively decreasing (husbands) or increasing (wives) their contribution to housework (Brines, 1994; Bittman, England, Folbre, Sayer, & Martheson, 2003; Greenstein, 2000). Brines’s (1994) provocative