Policy Regime Structuring of Class v. Gender Equality in Australia, Great Britain and the US.

We extend theory on how varieties of capitalism affect gender equality to propose that production regimes alter total household time in paid and unpaid labor, with implications for gender equality across social classes in the liberal market regimes of Australia, Great Britain and the US. In liberal market regimes, the reliance on market factors pulls both partners into employment, increasing average household time in paid labor, but greater returns to general education simultaneously widen the wage gap. Consequently, highly educated women in liberal market economies enjoy greater employment and domestic equality by spending more hours in paid labor and less time in unpaid. In contrast, low-educated women might be employed, but in more precarious positions with fewer paid hours simultaneous with retaining a greater domestic time burden. We test these hypotheses using data from the most recent waves of the Multinational Time Use Study for Australia, Great Britain and the US. Across the three countries, policy legacies vary the returns to education and wage inequality structuring household labor, enabling us to assess the sensitivity of our model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]