This study applies a methodology used by De Henau and Himmelweit (2013) to study resource allocation in Australian mixed-sex couple households. Using 18 waves of data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey and by means of fixed effects estimations, the study identifies how men’s and women’s contributions via paid and unpaid work influences their satisfaction with the financial situation (SWFS) within households. Employment status is used to proxy each partner’s contribution to household resources. The results reveal that paid contributions through full-time employment have a strong role in determining SWFS. This is a source of gender difference because Australian men are much more likely to be engaged in full-time employment than women. Most often, for both men and women, unpaid contributions to household resources (proxied by less than full-time employment) has a detrimental effect on their own SWFS, but smaller effects on their partner’s SWFS. These results imply that gender asymmetry in paid and unpaid contributions to household resources contributes to the reproduction of gender inequalities within Australian households. The results add external validity to the relevance of De Henau and Himmelweit’s (2013) analysis of these issues.

The availability of child-care services has often been advocated as one of the instruments to counter the fertility decline observed in many high-income countries. In the recent past, large inflows of low-skilled migrants have substantially increased the supply of child-care services. In this paper, we examine if immigration has actually affected fertility exploiting the natural experiment occurred in Italy in 2007, when a large inflow of migrants—many of them specialized in the supply of child care—arrived unexpectedly. With a difference-in-differences method, we show that immigrant female workers have increased native births by a number that ranges roughly from 2% to 4%. We validate our result by the implementation of an instrumental variable approach and several robustness tests, all concluding that the increase in the supply of child-care services by immigrant women has positively affected native fertility.

Evolutionary treatments of women's work and the sexual division of labour derive from sexual selection theory and focus on an observed cross-cultural trend: tasks performed by women tend to be more compatible with childcare and produce less economic risk than tasks performed by men. Evolutionary models emphasize biological sex differences and opportunity costs to understand this pattern of behaviour, yet deviations remain poorly understood. We examine variation in women's work among Shodagor fisher–traders in Bangladesh with the goal of explaining such deviations related to women's work. First, we demonstrate that women's trading produces higher variance returns than men's work – a pattern not previously quantified. Next, we test predictions from the economy of scale model to understand the socioecological circumstances associated with trading. We suggest that relaxing model assumptions around biological constraints may elucidate key circumstances under which members of one gender should systematically engage in work that is incompatible with childcare and/or produces higher levels of economic risk. Results indicate that biological sex differences are insufficient to explain gendered patterns of behaviour but removal of childcare constraints and comparative advantages related to opportunity costs can explain adherence to and deviation from trends in women's work and the division of labour.