BACKGROUNDGendered trends in housework provide an important insight into changing gender inequality. In particular, they shed light on the debate over the stalling of the 'gender revolution'. Additionally, the gender division of housework is significantly related to couple well-being; disagreements over housework are among the major sources of marital conflict.
OBJECTIVEThe objective is to bring the evidence on gendered trends in time spent on core housework up to date, and to investigate cross-national variation in those trends.
METHODSUsing 66 time use surveys from 19 countries, we apply a random-intercept, randomslope model to investigate half a century of change in gender differences in housework .
RESULTSThere is a general movement in the direction of greater gender equality, but with significant country differences in both the level and the pace of convergence. Specifically, there was a slowing of gender convergence from the late 1980s in those countries where men and women's time in housework was already more equal, with steeper gender convergence continuing in those countries where the gender division of housework was less equal.
We augment measures of cultural omnivorousness, based theoretically on the breadth of cultural tastes, with a new but related dimension of voraciousness. This reflects a 'quantitative' dimension of leisure consumption based upon both the range and the frequency of leisure participation. Voraciousness can be theoretically interpreted in relation to notions of cultural repertoires, to the changing pace of work and leisure in late modernity, and to the 'insatiable' quality of contemporary consumption. From British time-use data, voraciousness proved to share many relationships found in the analysis of omnivorousness, for example, with educational qualifications and job's social status. Moreover, these relationships persisted over time irrespective of individuals' time and money resources. Since voraciousness is associated with high status individuals, and since it is not primarily about the availability of time or money, we argue that it is a symbolic status marker associated with notions such as being harried, keeping busy, multitasking, and embracing a diverse cultural consumption pattern.
This article presents an overview of the gendered distinctions between housework and child care, illustrating those distinctions through time-use diary research. Following the logic of the gender structure perspective, I discuss findings that demonstrate differences between the gendered performance of housework and child care at the individual, institutional, and interactional levels of the gender structure. I show that distinguishing between housework and child care at these different levels of analysis aids in developing a more nuanced appreciation of the processes that underpin the gender division of domestic work and care, and I argue that these distinctions have important implications for gender theory and policy.One of the issues for a sociological approach to the division of household work has been the tendency of economic-based perspectives to treat all unpaid household activities together, counterpoised to paid work. Economic models of household production (e.g., Becker, 1965) were predicated on rates of market income, where the value of unpaid labor was estimated as a shadow wage calculated according to how much it would cost to employ someone else to do it.
Recently much attention has been focused on whether the gender transformation of paid and unpaid work in society referred to as the gender revolution has hit a wall, or at least stalled. In this article, we discuss key trends in the gender division of labor across 13 developed countries over a 50‐year period. These trends show little decisive evidence for a stall but rather a continuing, if uneven, long‐term trend in the direction of greater gender equality. We set out a theoretical framework for understanding slow change in the division of unpaid work and care (lagged generational change). We argue that, through a long‐term view of the processes of change, this framework can help address why progress in the convergence in paid and unpaid work promised by the gender revolution has been so slow.
According to the gender‐deviance neutralization hypothesis, men and women in household circumstances that contradict the normal expectations of gender display their gender accordingly, by either increasing or decreasing their contribution to household tasks. In this article, I review and reassess the large‐scale quantitative evidence, concluding that considerable doubt has subsequently been cast on this hypothesis. For women, research shows that the original identification of gender‐deviance neutralization behavior was questionable, as it failed to take into account women's absolute levels of income. For men, both more recent quantitative and indicative qualitative research suggests that such behavior was always limited to a very small group. Subsequent changes in the contributions to housework of men from lower socioeconomic groups suggest that such display may no longer be evident.
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