Gender Theory and Household Labor

Journal of Marriage and Family, 2008

Notwithstanding significant rise in awareness and activism in the field of empowerment of women, and in spite of women's increased commitment to the labour force market and their associated political and social achievements, their advances have not been paralleled in the familial sphere. The vast majority of household work is still performed by women. In the patriarchy-dominated Indian society household labour is largely believed to be the responsibility of women—daughters, wives and mothers— mostly irrespective of their marital status, even their social, economic, and educational background. An egalitarian

2000

Time-diary data from representative samples ofAmerican adults show thatthenumber ofoverall hours ofdomestic labor (excluding child care andshopping) has continued to decline steadily and predictably since 1965. This finding is mainly due to dramatic declines among women (both in and out of thepaidlabor market), whohave cuttheir housework hours almostin halfsince the 1960s: abouthalfof women's 12-hour-perweek decline can beaccounted for by compositional shifts -such as increased labor force participation, later marriage, andfewer children. In contrast, men's housework time has almost doubled during thisperiod (to thepoint where men were responsible for a third of housework in the 1990s), and only about 15% of theirfive-hour-perweek increase can be attributed to compositional factors. Parallel results on gender differences in housework were obtained from the National Survey of Families and Households estimate data, even though these produce figures 50% higher than diary data. Regression results examiningfactors related to wives' and husbands' housework hours show more support for the time-availability and relative-resource models of household production thanfor thegender perspective, although there issome support for the latter perspective aswell.

Journal of Family Theory & Review, 2011

Canadian Review of Sociology/Revue canadienne de sociologie

Housework is asymmetrically distributed by gender. This uneven allocation is an important indicator of inequality between women and men. The imbalance is closing, although exactly why remains uncertain. It is also unclear if the convergence has more to do with women's lives becoming more like men's, or whether it is because men are changing their practices on the home front. Using 30 years of nationally representative time use diary data, we explore three broad theoretical frameworks addressing social change-cultural, structural, and demographic-to examine how and why the gender dynamics around housework are shifting. We find that structural factors, and in particular women's engagement with paid work, have changed most sharply as drivers of greater symmetry in domestic labor, although changing cultural beliefs have contributed as well. Furthermore, there have been significant changes in men's behavior. One focal point for this domestic change is in men's and women's shifting practices around childcare. Intensive parenting, not just intensive mothering, has become more prevalent. Résumé Le travail ménager n'est pas distribué de manière uniforme entre les sexes. Cette inégalité des rôles est un important indicateur de celle qui existe entre les femmes et les hommes. Ce déséquilibre s'atténue, même si la raison exacte en demeure incertaine. On ignoreégalement si cette

European Sociological Review, 2005

Why has the gendered division of domestic labour proved so resistant to change despite the growth in married women's labour force participation? We develop a game theoretic model of marriage to show that women's individual levels of relative economic autonomy are not in themselves sufficient to bring about an aggregate shift in the division of domestic labour. Using data for 22 countries from the 1994 International Social Survey Programme, we show that what is required is that there be a greater proportion of economically autonomous women within the society as a whole, together with a sufficiently large proportion of men who, if faced with an economically autonomous woman, would rather participate in domestic tasks than endure marital breakdown. These results suggest that until we see greater gender material equality for the majority of women in a society and an evolution in men's gender ideology, the gendered division of domestic labour will persist.

Women's Studies International Forum, 1995

Synopsis -Drawing on qualitative research with 23 British dual earner couples, this article explores theoretical issues of gender differences and gender equality as they relate specifically to an understanding and analysis of women and men's contributions to household work and parenting. It is argued that the relationship between women's greater contribution to household work and their relative inequality to men in employment and public life -what Dinnerstein (1978) referred to as the relationship between "the rocking of the cradle and the ruling of the world" -remains the chief focus of research and analysis in the subject area of gender divisions of household labour. While recognizing the importance of such a focus, both for feminist research as well as for women outside of academia, I draw attention to one of the costs of such a focus, which has been an inadequate recognition of the various contigurations that gender differences may take within household life. In particular, the article argues that there. are several critical insights from ongoing feminist debates on gender equality and gender difference which could be usefully incorporated into the methodological and theoretical literature on gender divisions of household labour so as to enrich our understanding and analysis of persistent gender differences in household life and labour.

This book represents an important contribution to the current sociological literature on the gender division of labour. As Judith Treas writes in the introductory chapter, “studies of the division of household labour have only rarely addressed the broader context within which preferences are formed and housework arrangements are worked out” (p. 7). Remedying this omission is precisely the key motivation of this book, which consists of a collection of twelve chapters from leading international scholars in the field. Dividing the Domestic suggests that scholars working on the gender division of work should avoid “monocausal explanations” and move on to a type of analytical framework that considers the complex intersection of cultural, normative, political, demographic, and socioeconomic factors.

Soc. Probs., 1991

Gender Inequality and the Division of Household Labor in the United States and Sweden: A SociaUst-Feminist Approach* TONI M. CALASANTI, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University CAROL A. BAILEY, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University In this paper, we ...

Community, Work & Family, 2012

This study tests alternative theoretical models of the division of household labor within a non-familial context of men and women operating homes for autistic children and adults. This context makes it possible to disentangle overlapping hypotheses that stem from competing models. A sample of 128 staff members completed extensive questionnaires. The analyses yielded considerably different patterns of results for men and women. The results for the men provided support for the relative resources model, showing that men's contributions to household labor decreased as their resources increased. The results for the women provided support for the human capital model, showing that women's contributions increased as their resources increased. The gender construction approach may account for these gender differences in the determinants of involvement, suggesting that men and women utilize their resources for 'doing gender'.