Household labor allocation among married and cohabiting couples in Italy

The recent years have seen increase in the phenomenon of non-marital unions also in a country such as Italy which is characterized by traditional family behaviours. The present paper aims to study the extent to which marriage and cohabitation differ in the division of household labour within the couple with data from the nationally representative survey “Family and Social Subjects” conducted in Italy in 2003. The article examines the differences between currently married and currently cohabiting couples in their household labour allocation, distinguishing the heterogeneous groups of cohabitations and marriages according to the experience of previous unions. This allows identification of couples in different stages of their life course and to better characterize differences across couples. Results suggest that, on the one hand, cohabiting couples present more equal arrangements than married ones. Household labour time is, indeed, shared more equally among cohabitations than among marriages, and this is due to fewer hours spent by cohabiting women in household tasks than by their married counterparts. On the other hand, the experience of previous unions does not necessarily mean more equal allocation of household labour in the current union. Having experienced previous unions for married individuals means a more equal allocation of household labour than among married couples in their first unions; however, the same result does not hold for cohabitations. Unions before marriages are predominantly premarital cohabitations and, thus, the patterns established in the cohabitation period are carried over into marriage; in contrast, cohabitations with previous unions are predominantly cohabitations following the end of a previous marriage and, thus, they probably represent particularly selected couples.