These gender trends in paid and unpaid work confirm previous findings (e.g. Aguiar and Hurst, 2007, Gimenez-Nadal and Sevilla-Sanz, 2012). While the development of labour saving devices and their massive adoption by households should also have contributed to the decline in time spent on household work, yet evidence suggests that such appliances had little effect (Bittman et al., The diverging trends across countries are a result of different evolutions of traditional gender roles, as well as of policies that affect female labour market participation, including parental leave (OECD, 2012a).