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When sociologists first turned their attention to the phenomenon of the “second shift”—the unpaid domestic labor performed by women after their formal workday ends—the prevailing assumption was that this burden would dissolve as wives entered the paid workforce in greater numbers. Arlie Hochschild, whose interviews with dual-earner households in the 1980s gave the concept its name, found otherwise. The women she studied returned home to a near-total responsibility for cooking, cleaning, and childcare, while their husbands’ contributions, where they existed, were framed by both spouses as discretionary favors rather than obligations.

For a decade this account dominated. Yet by the early 2000s, a competing body of work led by Suzanne Bianchi complicated the picture. Drawing on large national time-diary datasets rather than intimate interviews, Bianchi documented a genuine convergence: men’s contributions to housework and childcare had risen substantially, and the raw gap in hours had narrowed far more than Hochschild’s pessimism implied.