Who Wants a ‘Smart Wife’? Gender and Educational Differences in Willingness to Use Technology for Domestic Work Across Europe
Ekaterina Hertog, Oxford Internet Institute
Unpaid household labour is a major social and economic activity that underpins families and households and is vital for social functioning. At the individual level, household labour is critical to health and well-being (Coltrane 2000), but it is also very time consuming and shared unequally within and between households (Craig and Churchill 2019).
We apply data from the 2017 Special Eurobarometer survey to capture adoption of automated outsourcing within the home and attitudinal support for the use of robots to care for aged family members. We assess whether levels of support are socially patterned by gender, occupation, education, relationship status and the co-presence of young children. We account for regional variation in levels of support within European countries given significant heterogeneity across regional, rural, and urban areas. We estimate how local GDP, women’s employment at the sub-national-level as well as the generosity of welfare policies to support people of old age are associated with levels of support. Ultimately, these analyses provide rich insights into the individual, sub-national and national differences in support for domestic automation.
Ekaterina’s research interests lie at the intersection of digital sociology and family sociology. She leads the ESRC-funded DomesticAI project that scopes new technologies’ potential to free up time now locked into unpaid domestic labour and measures how willing people are to introduce these technologies into their private lives.