Over the years many changes have happened in the home, especially over the last century. Society has changed the traditional gender roles considerably and this might be for the better or not. In the early part of the twentieth century women were seen as being the ones who stayed at home while the men went out to work and earned the money. Over the course of the century that has now changed and women are now working fulltime. I shall look at this in a bit of detail.
According to "Gender Transformations" by Sylvia Walby (1997) there has been a reduction in the number of households where men earn the majority of the household income because wives work full time. This has changed from 83 per cent in "73 to 55 per cent in "93. There has also been an increase in the number of households where earnings are equal which has in the same time span gone from 14 to 30 per cent. The statistics for the wife earning the most has gone from 3 per cent to 15 for those that are in full-time employment. Many people are arguing that there has been a small decrease in inequality in the home and with the assignment of jobs and overall power in the household over a small amount of time. This is associated with the rise of women's employment. Some say there's been no change and some say there's insufficient evidence to say otherwise. According to time budget studies, where women have been asked to fill in detailed accounts of how they spend their time, women in full-time employment do less housework than other people who are non-employed or only do part-time work, which I thought would have been obvious anyway. Also with the time budget studies it shows that women's position in the household has enhanced and that the amount of housework done by men has multiplied over time, especially with those people who are married to full-time employed women. This research that I've just talked about comes from national and UK studies.