ANNE E. LINCOLN Southern Methodist University Gender, Productivity, and the Marital Wage Premium Explanations for married men’s wage premium often emphasize greater market productivity due to a gendered division of household labor, though this ‘‘specialization thesis’’ has been insufficiently interrogated. Using data from Wave 2 of the National Survey of Families and Households (N ¼ 972), this paper examines the relationship between wages and time spent in paid labor and housework for married women and men with high levels of labor force attach- ment and their spouses. Scrutiny of couples’ time use finds strong evidence for the gendered division of labor, but little support for the antic- ipated wage effects of the specialization thesis itself. Less strict sample restrictions point to the need for continued research directed at couples’ joint employment and household labor decisions. A substantial body of research has shown that marriage is strongly correlated with higher earn- ings for men (for reviews, see Korenman & Neumark, 1991; Loh, 1996). The robust predic- tive power of marriage found for men’s wages has led to an almost ubiquitous inclusion of a con- trol for marriage in wage equations for men. Research into the phenomenon has found that the hourly wages of married men are generally 10% to 40% more than those earned by never- married men. Moreover, this finding has re- mained relatively consistent for decades, despite controls for a myriad of theoretically relevant human capital and job characteristics (Cohen, 2002; Chun & Lee, 2001; Gray & Vanderhart, 2000), even among men employed within the same occupation (Hotchkiss & Moore, 1999) and same-gender identical twins (Antonovics & Town, 2004). One intriguing explanation on offer is that marriage permits men to be more produc- tive in paid labor by allowing them to focus on market production while their wives specialize in home production (the ‘‘specialization hypoth- esis’’). Typically, the requisite information on spousal time constraints has not been available to researchers. Moreover, the generalizability of the phenomenon to women has gone largely untested until recently. This paper advances our understanding of the relationship between gen- der, productivity, and wages by examining the evidence for the specialization thesis for both married women and men. The specialization explanation for the mar- riage wage premium emphasizes the well-known neoclassical economic arguments of Becker (1981) and others that a gendered division of household labor benefits male productivity at paid labor, though the precise beneficial mecha- nism remains unclear. In this literature, produc- tivity is typically inferred from men’s wages; uncommonly, Bellas (1992) found that male fac- ulty with homemaking spouses not only had higher salaries than men whose wives were em- ployed but also published significantly more scholarly articles and books. Although nearly all research uses the presence of children as a proxy for household responsibilities, many Department of Sociology, Southern Methodist University, P.O. Box 750192, Dallas, TX 75275-0192 (lincoln@smu. edu). Key Words: family economics, gender, housework/division of labor, income, marriage, National Survey of Families and Households. 806 Journal of Marriage and Family 70 (August 2008): 806–814