Sex or sexuality? Analyzing the division of labor and travel in gay, lesbian, and straight households

People make tradeoffs between paid and unpaid labor, and in straight households women typically do the lion's share of unpaid labor, including household-serving travel. Nearly all of the previous research on this topic is limited to married heterosexual households with children, a surprisingly small and shrinking portion of the population. Using pooled data from the 2003-12 American Time Use Surveys, we explore how household-serving labor and travel vary across household types in the U.S. We examine the paid and unpaid labor tradeoffs made by partnered same-sex couples with and without children, and find that their division of paid and unpaid labor, as well as household-serving travel such as chauffeuring children, occupies a statistical middle ground between straight men and women. This suggests that the gendered nature of paid and unpaid work and travel is muted in the absence of a two-sex household structure, though some gendered differences persist.