In the literature on household work, “gender display” refers to the hypothesis that women who outearn their husbands tend to do more household work than women whose earnings are similar to their husbands'. Much of the prior literature on this topic has debated whether or not gender display exists in the U.S. and other developed countries. However, the extent to which gender display is found to be true may depend on social context. Capitalizing on comparisons of contemporary Mainland China and Taiwan, this study reexamines the gender display hypothesis in terms of varying social contexts. My results show that (1) there is some evidence for gender display in rural Mainland China and Taiwan, but not in urban Mainland China, and (2) the evidence for gender display is more pronounced in Taiw...[ Read more ]

In the literature on household work, “gender display” refers to the hypothesis that women who outearn their husbands tend to do more household work than women whose earnings are similar to their husbands'. Much of the prior literature on this topic has debated whether or not gender display exists in the U.S. and other developed countries. However, the extent to which gender display is found to be true may depend on social context. Capitalizing on comparisons of contemporary Mainland China and Taiwan, this study reexamines the gender display hypothesis in terms of varying social contexts. My results show that (1) there is some evidence for gender display in rural Mainland China and Taiwan, but not in urban Mainland China, and (2) the evidence for gender display is more pronounced in Taiwan than in rural Mainland China. These results reveal not only that gender display is context-specific, but that the contextual variation of gender display depends more on political ideology than on macro-level economic development.