Despite increased female labor participation in Japan, the narrowing of the gender gap in domestic labor has stagnated, with women still performing most household chores. Two theories aim to explain this: economic exchange perspectives, where men trade their higher earnings for their spouse's domestic labor, and gender display perspectives, where women perform housework to fulfill traditional feminine roles, even if they are primary breadwinners. Empirical findings remain uncertain. Based on expectation states theory, we propose that spouses value each other's employment status alongside income and gender roles. In Japan, widely shared status beliefs rank regular employment above non-regular employment, assigning greater social esteem and perceived competence to regular employees. Using fixed-effects models to analyze data on 30,210 individuals from Japanese Panel Study of Employment Dynamics (2017–2022), we identify curvilinear U-shaped relationships between wives' housework hours and their relative income when husbands have higher employment status, both on workdays and days off. This finding supports economic exchange and gender play perspectives. Interestingly, the curvilinear U-shaped relationship flattens on both workdays and days off when couples share equal employment status and shifts to a monotonically decreasing pattern on workdays when wives hold higher employment status. This suggests that wives may reduce housework efforts proportionally to their relative income only when their workplace status surpasses their husbands’, revealing persistent gender-biased social expectations and evaluations. Husbands' housework time seems unaffected by their relative income or employment status. Advancing gender equality requires challenging hierarchical, sex-based job segregation and beliefs about employment status.
