Italian women’s satisfaction across life-course events

The objective of the paper is to shed light on mechanisms behind Italian women’s satisfaction with the division of domestic work with partner. Using a two-wave panel dataset (2003 and 2007) corresponding to the Italian version of Generations and Gender Surveys (GGS), we are interested to ascertain the impact of life course events, such as transition to motherhood and transition from cohabitation to marriage on women’s satisfaction. In addition, we will focus on impact of changes in hours of housework and in hours of employment of partners. Changes in formal and informal external support both in care and domestic work and their impact on satisfaction will be also taken into account. We assume that women having a baby are on average more satisfied than women who have not a baby. Because of this selection effect, previous studies underestimate the negative effect of parenthood on woman’s satisfaction with division of domestic work. With reference to the years immediately after the birth of a child, the difference-in-differences (DID) parameterization lets us to disentangle the selection effect and the motherhood effect. Our results show that happier women are more likely to experience motherhood in the 2003-2007 time interval, but we also find a strong negative net effect of transition to motherhood on woman’s satisfaction. This negative effect is even emphasized for those women who share with their partners a more egalitarian gender ideology and for women residing in the South of Italy.