From Dolls to Dishes: How Gender Norms Shape Household Roles

Exploiting quasi-random variation in firstborn sex, we show that Brazilian mothers with older daughters work more and do less housework, evidence that gender norms transfer domestic burdens across generations, enabling mothers’ market work at daughters’ expense. This paper investigates whether daughters substitute for maternal domestic work, thereby affecting mothers’ labor supply decisions and contributing to the intergenerational transmission of gendered care responsibilities. Exploiting the quasi-random assignment of a child’s sex at birth, we use the sex of the firstborn child as an exogenous shock to the mother’s domestic work burden. Using pooled data from the Brazilian National Household Sample Survey (PNAD) for 2001–2015, we focus on married mothers aged 25–54 with at least two children (the youngest aged 0–6 and the eldest aged 7–18). We find that mothers of firstborn daughters are 2.9% more likely to be employed, work 0.88 more hours per week in the labor market, and spend 0.83 fewer hours per week on domestic work compared to mothers of firstborn sons. These effects grow with the daughter’s age, reaching a 6.8% impact on labor force participation and a two-hour shift from unpaid to paid work when daughters are between 16 and 18 years old, and are amplified in larger families. Crucially, we find no analogous effects among fathers, and daughters spend on average 4.5 more hours per week on household chores than sons, evidence of unequal redistribution rather than collective reallocation. To formalize these mechanisms, we develop a static model of female labor supply in which gender norms operate through two channels: as- signing domestic responsibilities disproportionately to women, and determining how much of that burden is alleviated by an older child’s presence. Our findings reveal that daughters enable mothers’ economic participation, but at the cost of early socialization into unpaid care roles —an intergenerational transfer that sustains, rather than dissolves, the domestic gender gap.

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