Unpaid Domestic Work and Gender Inequality in the Time of COVID-19 in Malaysia

The COVID-19 pandemic affected how we spend our time in the workplace and at home. Moreover, it caused employed couples to simultaneously work from home and deal with unpaid work due to Malaysia’s Movement Control Order (MCO). What happens to housework and childcare responsibilities when women and men are required to work from home due to an abrupt lockdown? Who is doing the housework and childcare? Who should be responsible for unpaid domestic work? What are the factors that affect men’s share in housework and childcare? This paper reports the early results of an online survey conducted on Malaysian men and women during the nationwide imposed lockdown in May 2020. In addition, it discusses how the pandemic affected unpaid housework and childcare time and responsibilities in Malaysia. The findings suggest that women spend more time on housework and childcare than men and are responsible for most unpaid domestic work during COVID-19. These findings are consistent with those obtained before the COVID-19 pandemic. The findings also suggest that the time availability perspective affects men’s share in housework and that the relative resources perspective affects their share in childcare during COVID-19. Overall, the results call for policy attention to the factors that narrow gender inequality in unpaid domestic work.

De invloed van de coronacrisis op de relatieve verdeling van zorg door moeders en vaders

The influence of the COVID-19 pandemic on the relative division of care tasks between mothers and fathers: a longitudinal perspective For many parents, the combination of work and care was already demanding and unevenly distributed prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic has clearly influenced the relative division of care tasks, but how and why remains unclear. We use longitudinal panel data from the LISS panel, collected in April, June and November 2020, to analyze the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic on the relative distribution of care by mothers and fathers in the Netherlands. A complex picture emerges from these longitudinal analyses, and several theoretical perspectives appear to be relevant. We conclude that time availability mainly has an effect at the beginning of the pandemic, while relative resources play a role the longer the pandemic endures.

Couples’ Relative Resources, Male Power, and Relationship Conflict from a Comparative Perspective

Using two waves of the Generations and Gender Survey for eight European countries, we test under what conditions couples experience high levels of disagreement over time or separate. The results partly support the idea of relative resources, suggesting that a decrease in the status of men in couples (job loss) is significantly associated with high levels of conflict. The transition to high conflict is more frequent when there is a discrepancy between policy and behavior. Social policies designed to meet the needs of working parents in dual-earner couples together with the diffusion of gender egalitarian values can lead to a reduction in unhealthy levels of couple conflict.

Couples experiencing private life constraints to their career: understanding home-to-career interference from a couple's perspective

PurposeThis paper examines home-to-career interference (HCI), i.e., the extent to which employees perceive that their private life has constrained their career decisions to date, from a couple perspective. Building on scarcity theory, the authors expect higher levels of HCI among couples that need more and have less resources and, within couples, among the partner who is most likely to take care of home demands. Therefore, the authors explore the role of children and social support as between-couple differences and gender, relative resources and work centrality as within-couple differences. Moreover, the authors examine how one partner's HCI is related to both partners' life satisfaction.Design/methodology/approachHypotheses are tested using hierarchical linear modeling and APIM-analysis with a sample of 197 heterosexual dual-earner couples (N = 394).FindingsAs hypothesized, employees in couples with more children and less social support reported more HCI. No support was found for within-couple differences in gender, educational level or work centrality. Next, HCI was negatively related to employees' own life satisfaction but not to their partner's life satisfaction.Originality/valueThe authors enrich the understanding of HCI by examining this phenomenon from a couple perspective and shed light on couple influences on career experiences.

Gay Bars and the Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic

This study investigates the impact of COVID-19 pandemic public closure orders on business listings for gay bars. Recent studies have shown gay bars to be quite vulnerable, with listings showing a 36.6% decline between 2007 and 2019. To supplement historic data from comprehensive printed listings, the Damron Guide, we conducted a census of online business listings. We verified each listing in the 2019 edition, also searching for new bars that were not included in that version. Results show that gay bar listings declined by 15.2% between 2019 and Spring 2021. This compares, however, to a 14.4% decline for 2017 and 2019, indicating a surprisingly stable rate of decline. This stability may be a methodological artifact, but may also reflect the relative resources of surviving gay bars going into pandemic, and/or their continuing vulnerability and precarity.

Rice Breeding in Vietnam: Retrospects, Challenges and Prospects

Rice breeding was conducted for a long time during historical times and is an important job in Vietnam because rice is the major food for domestic consumption and export. In this review, we have provided a comprehensive insight into the importance of promising rice germplasm resources, breeding achievements, and breeding approaches as well as discussed challenges and perspectives of rice breeding in this country. With rice germplasm and wild rice relative resources with rich and various genetic diversity, their useful genes and traits have been exploited and integrated into commercial varieties as the final outputs of rice breeding programs. New achievements of the modern genetics era have been approached and effectively contributed to breeding activities in this country. Genome sequences, molecular breeding, and mutation are powerful tools and playing vital roles in developing new varieties with characteristics of interest that should be followed by the current market demands. In the last decades, there has been a plethora of newly generated varieties by Vietnamese scientists and rice breeders and approved by the state authorities. However, very few domestic mega varieties have prevailed over the imported varieties. Therefore, rice breeding in this country is faced with big challenges, including limitations of backgrounds, budgets, and even talents in basic research to compete with other rice-producing countries. The target goals and long-term approaches for rice breeding should be paid explicitly in priority to ensure national food security and the advantage and development of rice breeding in this country.

Local Variation in Gendered Family Policy Use: Evidence of Local Gender Contracts?

A central and unique part of Sweden’s family policy programme is care leave that working parents can use when children are sick and cannot attend (pre)school. The gender-equal policy entails that parents may divide the leave as they see fit. However, mothers and fathers do not share care leave equally and care leave patterns may vary geographically. The aim of this paper is to examine the interaction between gendered care leave and geographical context using the theory of gender contracts. We ask how geographical variation in fathers’ share of care leave varies by scale, and how both individual factors and geographical determinants, representing local gender contracts, are associated with fathers’ share of care leave. Distinctive from previous work, we use geocoded full-population register data and individualized neighbourhoods at multiple scales in order to be able to better measure contextual effects on care leave use. We find substantial spatial variation in fathers’ share of care leave, with clustering depending on scale level. Using the nearest 200 fathers with young children, a factor analysis summarizes local gender contracts into three factors labelled as elite, marginalization and private sector. Results show that especially living in local gender contract areas identified as “marginalized” positively affects fathers’ share of care leave. Living in the most segregated neighbourhoods has substantial effects on fathers’ share of care leave, but overall, neighbourhood effects are moderate. A gender contract perspective shows negotiations resulting from locally clustered gendered norms and relative resources between partners influence who stays home with sick children.

My Gain or Your Loss? Changes in within-Couple Relative Wealth and Partners’ Life Satisfaction

This article studies the relationship between partner’s wealth share and their life satisfaction in different-sex couples using the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (2002, 2007, 2012, and 2017). Resource-based theories and gender ideology are two prominent approaches to explain the effects of within-couple relative resources on various outcomes. Recently, scholars have argued that not relative but absolute personal resources are the crucial factor (autonomy perspective). Testing these different approaches is challenging because relative wealth mathematically perfectly depends on both partners’ absolute wealth, meaning the effects of relative and absolute wealth are hard to disentangle. To accurately test the theoretical approaches, this study analyses the relationship between relative wealth and life satisfaction under different conditions, such as whether relative wealth increases due to an increase in one’s own absolute wealth or a decrease in one’s partner’s absolute wealth. Individual fixed effects regressions show no statistically significant relationships between relative wealth and life satisfaction for men. In contrast, for women the relationship between their relative wealth and life satisfaction is significantly positive, in line with resource-based theories and the autonomy perspective. Further analyses reveal that this relationship is driven rather by changes in women’s own than in their partner’s absolute wealth.

Theorizing housework as an example of power dynamics

In Chapter 2 of the book we provide a review of the theoretical and empirical scholarship that has studied housework and document how power dynamics have been integral to both strands of scholarship. We present reviews of time availability, relative resources, bargaining, gender ideology, and economic dependence perspectives. We explain how power has been implicit in previous theorizing than then present our argument for the use of housework to understand power within the social exchange that is an intimate relationship.