At the time an article I co-authored, called ‘When does gender trump money? Bargaining and time in household work’, was published, the topic of intrahousehold organization had become newsworthy because of the emergence of second wave feminism and the mass entry of married women into the labour force. Although building on previous research, the time-diary data from all adults in the household was larger in scale and better suited to the task than anything published before. The findings were, it seems, provocative. A stream of responses emerged claiming to contest the findings. In this chapter, I explain the origins of this research and some of its conceptual limitations, through a careful examination of the research procedures of prior and subsequent research, I argue much of contestation has roots in various disciplinary models and political values. Finally, I offer some conjectures about how these might be settled by further research.