Research examining the unequal allocation of housework between spouses is extensive. A major reason for this is that women’s investment in unpaid work is the main bottleneck for their continual success in the labor market relative to men. In Israel in 2012, for example, three-quarters of Jewish women still prepare the meals and do the laundry, compared to less than 10 percent of men, although 83 percent of Jewish mothers of young children participated in paid work. To understand the mechanisms that create and sustain gender inequality, than, we cannot separate the public from the private sphere, as both are mutually related and are critical for challenging the gender order in the economy and society at large. The literature points on two main mechanisms underpinning the unequal division of labor; economic based mechanisms versus cultural mechanisms. The former, suggest that the allocation of housework between spouses is gender-neutral and based on a tradeoff between housework and paid work; the more one partner invests in paid work the less he/she will invest in housework. The latter, in contrast, point to gendering processes as significant determinants of housework allocation, accordantly, both paid work and unpaid work serve to confirm the assigned gender roles and reinforce the gendered identities of wives and husbands in heterosexual households. In this study we use the high-quality data of American Time Use Survey (ATUS), collected between 2003 and 2019, to test the explanatory power of each mechanism by the type of association between housework and earnings across partnership types and housework tasks. Since cultural theories are based on the performance of gender identity by heterosexual partners, we utilize the differences between same-and different-sex partners as natural experiment. Our comparison of the relation across partnership-types validates the power of gender-cultural mechanisms in different-sex partners, provides a better assessment of the differences between different types of households, and serves as a novel quantitative test of cultural mechanisms in same-sex partners.