As a consequence of the rising number of dual earner households, many contemporary couples in Europe face two potentially conflicting job schedules when figuring out how to allocate their time over a week. In this article we study how dual-earner couples with children organise their working time in Belgium, Italy and The Netherlands. We place working time coordination explicitly in a comparative framework to allow cross-country differences in time scheduling mechanisms to be revealed. We define working time coordination as an act that leads to hours of paid work performed by both parents at the same moment and of which the joint nature cannot be explained by factors other that the partners' potential to communicate on the timing of their work. Our main findings are that: (1) parents actively coordinate their working times in all three societies; (2) On average, Italian and Flemish dual earner parents tend to synchronise (increase their work time overlap) which indicates that parents aim at spending non-market time jointly; (3) Dutch dual earner parents tend to de-synchronize (decrease work time overlap) which indicates that the latter tend to maximize the amount of time that at least one parent is out of the job.
BACKGROUNDAttitudes toward gender roles are one of the factors that have received most attention in the literature on housework division. Nevertheless, egalitarian attitudes often do not match egalitarian domestic behaviors. OBJECTIVEThe paper's central hypothesis is that women's ability to assert their egalitarian beliefs is linked to having sufficient personal resources in economic and cultural terms. METHODSWe use the 2013-2014 Italian time-use survey (N = 7,707 couples) and analyze how relative resources and women's education moderate the relationship between gender ideology and housework division. RESULTSConsistent with our hypothesis, for a woman, the effect of gender ideology is strongest when she earns roughly as much or more than her partner and when she holds a college degree. When the woman's income is lower than the man's, the effect of women's gender ideology is quite small. If the woman does not have a degree, her egalitarian attitudes will not translate into her doing less housework. CONCLUSIONSGender ideology matters, but a solid bargaining position is needed in order to put it into practice. Social policies promoting gender equality in education and the labor market can increase women's capacity for translating egalitarian attitudes into actual behavior. CONTRIBUTIONThis paper's original contribution is in analyzing whether and how relative resources and education influence the effect of gender ideology on the division of housework. Carriero & Todesco: Housework division and gender ideology: When do attitudes really matter? 1040 http://www.demographic-research.orgMoreover, our analysis goes beyond most existing studies in its rare combination of behavior measures collected through a reliable time-use diary procedure and information regarding partners' gender ideology.
This article investigates attitudes towards the conditionality of benefits targeted to a specific needy group, the unemployed, and analyses their relationship with the structure of income inequality. The focus is on the deservingness of welfare recipients. The public seems to use five criteria to define deservingness and, consequently, the conditionality to which public support is subjected: need, attitude (i.e. gratefulness), control (over neediness), reciprocity (of giving and receiving) and identity, that is the similarity or proximity between the providers of public support (the taxpayers) and the people who should receive it. People’s willingness to help depends on how close they consider benefit recipients to be to themselves (i.e. the extent to which they belong to the same in-group). The identity criterion is the main object of our investigation. We argue that the operation of this criterion at the micro-level can be affected by macro-level variables. Specifically, we focus on different measures of the structure of income inequality which are indicators of the social distance between welfare recipients and taxpayers. Based on data from three waves of the European Values Study (1990–2008) collected in 30 countries, the study offers a comparative and longitudinal analysis. The picture emerging from the within-country analysis – which removed much of the between-country heterogeneity − shows that when the social distance grows, it is more difficult for the majority of citizens (upper and middle classes) to identify with the unemployed.
A long-standing theoretical tradition underlines the importance of comparison referents for fairness evaluation, i.e., people, experiences and expectations that individuals choose to compare with their own situation. However, few studies on perceived fairness of housework division have measured and tested comparison referents, partly because of the lack of suitable data. Moreover, findings were sometimes mixed because small convenience samples were used. Previous literature also neglected the distortive effects of self-serving bias in the choice of referents. This study, conducted in an Italian context, seeks to overcome these limitations by using a probabilistic sample and two different designs: a survey data analysis and an experimental-vignette technique which avoids the distortions of self-serving bias. The survey's findings reveal that the effects of comparison referents are strong and in line with expectations, though limited to the domestic behavior of male referents. Moreover, unfavorable comparisons have a stronger effect on perceived fairness than favorable ones. The vignette analysis indicates that comparison referents affect perceived housework fairness even if the effect of self-serving bias is controlled for.
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