In the last half a century, married females more than doubled their workforce participation
and significantly reduced their time spent on home production. Using a model of family
decision-making with home production and individual earnings potential heterogeneity, we
subject two prominent explanations for this aggregate change, namely, the evolution of the
gender earnings gap and cost of home appliances, to quantitative tests with respect to changes
in participation for disaggregated groups of couples and trends in time spent in leisure and
home production activities. We find that both forces are needed to understand the evolution
of married female time allocation over time, although the falling cost of home appliances is a
dominant explanation for time allocation outside of workplace, while the gender earnings gap
is the dominant explanation for the workforce participation decision.