The purpose of this article is to review research on the construction of gender ideology and its consequences. The article begins with a summary of research focused on measuring gender ideology—individuals' levels of support for a division of paid work and family responsibilities that is based on the belief in gendered separate spheres. We describe the ways this concept has been operationalized in widely available data sources and provide a categorization schema for the items used to measure gender ideology. We also review the research predicting gender ideology, focusing on social and demographic characteristics while concurrently examining studies using cross-sectional, trend, and panel data. Finally, this article summarizes research focused on the consequences of gender ideology, both in families and family-related behaviors and in other areas of social life where beliefs about gender are relevant, such as the workplace. We conclude with implications for future research for measurement tools, predictors of gender ideology, and consequences of ideology in individuals' lives.
The fundamental question in the study of the gendered division of household labor has come to be why, in the face of dramatic changes in women's employment and earnings, housework remains ''women's work.'' As a possible answer to this question, Brines (1994) presented a provocative conceptual model of the relationship between economic dependence and the performance of housework by wives and husbands. She concluded that the link between economic dependence and housework follows rules of economic exchange for wives, but among husbands, a gender display model is operative. This paper replicates and extends Brines' model by (a) replicating her work using a different data set; (b) adding additional controls to the model, including a measure of gender ideology; and (c) modeling a distributional (as opposed to absolute) measure of housework. For a measure of hours spent doing housework, the results of my analyses are consistent with Brines' suggestion of separate gender-specific processes linking economic dependence and amount of housework performed. For a distributional measure of housework, on the other hand, my analyses contradict Brines' findings and suggest that both husbands and wives are acting to neutralize a nonnormative provider role when they do housework. Further analyses suggest that
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. National Council on Family Relations is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of Marriage and Family.The literature suggests that gender ideology-how a person identifies herself or himself in terms of marital and family roles traditionally linked to gender-is related to the division of labor in the home. In this article I assert that it is not sufficient to merely examine the main effects of wives' and husbands' gender ideologies. Rather, it is essential to consider the interaction between the ideologies of wives and their husbands in order to understand how a division of household labor emerges. I hypothesize that a husband's gender ideology will not be related to the division of household labor for men married to traditional wives, but that it will be for men with egalitarian wives. An empirical test using data provided by 2,719 married couples from the National Survey of Families and Households confirms this hypothesis. Even after controlling for measures of market-and marital-specific capital, wives' and husbands' gender ideologies interact in terms of their effects on the division of household labor. Husbands do relatively little domestic labor unless both they and their wives are relatively egalitarian in their beliefs about gender and marital roles. State University, Raleigh, NC 27695 (ted_greenstein@ncsu.edu).Key Words: division of household labor, domestic labor, gender ideology, housework.The consensus of the empirical literature is that the division of household labor tends to be relatively traditional-that is, the wife performs a far greater proportion of household tasks than does her husband-in households where the wife earns more than her husband (Atkinson & Boles, Journal of Marriage and the Family 58 (August 1996): 585-595 585 This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Mon, 22 Dec 2014 15:48:20 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Journal of Marriage and the Family 1984) and even in households where the husband is not employed (Brayfield, 1992). This combination of market and nonmarket work is likely to force married women into working what Hochschild calls the "second-shift" (Hochschild, 1989b).Not only do married women perform far more household labor than their husbands, but the kinds of household tasks performed by wives and husbands differ. Many researchers (for example, Blair & Lichter, 1991; Brayfield, 1992; Lennon & Rosenfeld, 1994; Mederer, 1993) note that household labor remains highly segregated by sex. Those tasks that have been traditionally thought of as "women's work" (for example, cooking, laundry, housecleaning) are performed primarily by women, and "male" tasks such as yard work and auto main...
To explain wife abuse, we offer a refinement of relative resource theory, gendered resource theory, which argues that the effect of relative resources is contingent upon husbands' gender ideologies. We use data from the first wave of the National Survey of Families and Households (N ¼ 4,296) to test three theories of wife abuse. Resource theory receives no support. Relative resource theory receives limited support. Gendered resource theory receives strong support. Wives' share of relative incomes is positively related to likelihood of abuse only for traditional husbands. The findings suggest that both cultural and structural forces must be considered to understand marriage as a context for social interactions in which we create our gendered selves.Marriage is often a structural context of opportunity for husbands and wives to behave in ways that validate their identities as male and female, that is, to display the visible aspects of their gender ideologies. Studies of wife abuse have tended to partition structure and culture. This article examines the intersection of the two and argues that the culture moderates the effect of structure.Two social structural perspectives commonly used to explain wife abuse are resource theory and relative resource theory. These theories suggest that level of resources is the primary predictor of wife abuse. Specifically, they argue that married men who have few resources to offer (resource theory), or fewer resources than their wives (relative resource theory), are more likely than their resource-rich counterparts to use violence. Violence serves as a compensation for their shortage of resources. These theories have received support in a plethora of studies (Anderson, 1997;Hotaling & Sugarman, 1986;McCloskey, 1996). These structural explanations ignore cultural variables, however, and take for granted that married men want to be breadwinners, particularly in comparison to their wives. In other words, rather than accurately reflecting the variability in men's gender ideologies, such arguments assume all men to be traditional.In this study, we show the importance of gender ideology in understanding wife abuse by making the link between resources and ideology more explicit. We review resource theory and relative resource theory and their predictions concerning the occurrence of wife abuse. We then test both of these theories' predictions against our own gendered resource theory, which argues that the effect of relative resources on the occurrence of wife abuse is moderated by husbands' gender ideologies. That is, we show how structure and culture interact to
Using data from the International Social Justice Project, we describe the division of household labor in married couple households using a sample of 13 nations (N= 10,153). We find significant differences in the division of household labor based upon respondents’ nations of residence. We find support for the time availability approach; households where the wife is employed outside the home for pay are more likely to respond that husbands perform at least half of the household labor. We also find support for the relative resources approach; in households where wives’ education equals or exceeds that of their husbands, husbands are more likely to perform half of the household labor. We find little support for the economic dependence approach. We suggest that future cross‐national research should place individuals in context to determine why there are nation differences in the reported division of household labor.
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