Are Women Better than Men at Multitasking Household Activities? New Experimental Evidence By Charlene M. Kalenkoski and Gigi Foster * Becker’s standard household production model (Becker 1965, Becker 1985) implies that specialization in household produc- tion is driven by differences in house- hold and market productivity. Accord- ing to this model, if women have a com- parative advantage in household produc- tion, then women should completely spe- cialize in home production and men should completely specialize in market production. Pollak (2012) calls into question this com- plete specialization hypothesis, noting that the data show that incomplete specializa- tion is the norm. However, analyses of time- diary data (Kalenkoski, Ribar and Stratton 2005, Kalenkoski, Ribar and Stratton 2007, Kalenkoski and Foster 2008, Kalenkoski, Ribar and Stratton 2009, Gwozdz and Sousa-Poza 2010, Stratton 2012) show that women do perform more household produc- tion activities than men, even if specializa- tion by gender is not complete. Further- more, multitasking of housework activities is found to be more common among women than among men (Offer and Schneider 2011, Zaiceva and Zimmermann 2011). Are these differences the result of women being inherently more suited than men to household production activities and to the multitasking of these activities? Evidence from neuroscience (Weise et al. 2006) sug- gests the possibility of innate gender dif- * Kalenkoski: Ohio University, Department of Eco- nomics, Bentley Annex 351, Athens, OH 45701, kalenkos@ohio.edu. Foster: University of New South Wales, Building E-12, Kensington, NSW 2052 Australia, gigi.foster@unsw.edu.au. We thank Xi Mao and Markus Schaffner for research assistance. We are also grateful to the Australian School of Business Small Projects grant fund, ORSEE and the ASBLab at the University of New South Wales for enabling our experiments. This research has the approval of the UNSW Human Research Ethics Committee and the Institutional Review Board at Ohio University. All errors and viewpoints are our own. ferences in cognitive functioning that may affect task performance. Economists point to differences in preferences, social roles, and cultural constraints (Booth 2009, Cro- son and Gneezy 2009, de Mel, McKenzie and Woodruff 2009, Gneezy, Leonard and List 2009). However, direct measures of the home productivity of individuals typically cannot be constructed from existing survey data. Data sets that include household output measures (such as child outcomes) typi- cally do not include the corresponding in- put measures (such as parental time), and vice versa. We propose that experimental data can be used to determine whether women are better than men at household production. Buser and Peter (2012) have recently used experimental data to determine that there are no differences in the multitasking abil- ity of women and men when doing word searches and Soduku puzzles. Yet these tasks are quite different from those per- formed within the household. Therefore, in this paper we present results from a custom- designed experiment that simulates house- hold production tasks. First, however, we propose a theory of multitasking in the household to motivate our analysis. I. Multitasking Theory One can imagine a household that pro- duces a child commodity (C> 0) and a household commodity (H > 0), both of which yield utility for an adult in that household: (1) U = αC + βH The child commodity production func- 1