UCLA

People make tradeoffs between paid and unpaid labor, and in straight households women typically do the lion's share of unpaid labor, including household-serving travel. Nearly all of the previous research on this topic is limited to married heterosexual households with children, a surprisingly small and shrinking portion of the population. Using pooled data from the 2003–12 American Time Use Surveys, we explore how household-serving labor and travel vary across household types in the U.S. We examine the paid and unpaid labor tradeoffs made by partnered same-sex couples with and without children, and find that their division of paid and unpaid labor, as well as household-serving travel such as chauffeuring children, occupies a statistical middle ground between straight men and women. This suggests that the gendered nature of paid and unpaid work and travel is muted in the absence of a two-sex household structure, though some gendered differences persist.