Couples’ Communication Behaviour and the Gender Division of Family Work Across the Transition to Parenthood

This study investigates the conceptual argument that constructive and explicit couple communication may reduce gender inequalities in couples’ division of family work. We focus on the transition to parenthood which for most couples in Germany results in a shift towards a more traditional division of labour. Using 314 first-time parents from the German Family Panel, we apply growth curve models to assess whether partners’ prenatal characteristics explain the division of housework and childcare around the time of childbirth and in the following years. After controlling for gender ideologies and economic resources, male partners’ frequency of positive communication is associated with greater father involvement in housework and childcare from the start. However, neither men’s nor women’s communication behaviours dampen the shift towards a more traditional division of housework and childcare in the first years after childbirth. The frequency of negative communication does not correlate with the division of family work.

Home, sweet home? The impact of working from home on the division of unpaid work during the COVID-19 lockdown

A lockdown implies a shift from the public to the private sphere, and from market to non-market production, thereby increasing the volume of unpaid work. Already before the pandemic, unpaid work was disproportionately borne by women. This paper studies the effect of working from home for pay (WFH), due to a lockdown, on the change in the division of housework and childcare within couple households. While previous studies on the effect of WFH on the reconciliation of work and family life and the division of labour within the household suffered from selection bias, we are able to identify this effect by drawing upon the shock of the first COVID-19 lockdown in Austria. The corresponding legal measures left little choice over WFH. In any case, WFH is exogenous, conditional on a small set of individual and household characteristics we control for. We employ data from a survey on the gendered aspects of the lockdown. The dataset includes detailed information on time use during the lockdown and on the quality and experience of WFH. Uniquely, this survey data also includes information on the division, and not only magnitude, of unpaid work within households. Austria is an interesting case in this respect as it is characterized by very conservative gender norms. The results reveal that the probability of men taking on a larger share of housework increases if men are WFH alone or together with their female partner. By contrast, the involvement of men in childcare increased only in the event that the female partner was not able to WFH. Overall, the burden of childcare, and particularly homeschooling, was disproportionately borne by women.

Sustainability of Regional Factors on the Gendered Division of Housework in China

In China’s labor market, the traditional patterns of “male breadwinners, female housewives” have been changing noticeably, whereas such patterns remain unchanged in the household production field. This phenomenon greatly affects gender equality and social sustainability. Until now, most of the studies have focused on the attribution of micro-factors (e.g., individual income, education level, and time availability) to the formation of this pattern. However, the effect of macro-region factors (e.g., the regional economic development, population composition, employment, and gender norms) on the distribution of housework have been rarely studied. In this study, the data from the China General Social Survey (2015CGSS) and the China Genuine Progress Indicator Survey (2017CGPiS) of Beijing Normal University were comprehensively analyzed. On that basis, a gender norms index was first constructed to measure regional differences in gender concepts. Moreover, this study, by considering macro-region-varying factors, suggested that the synergetic effect between all of the mentioned factors could significantly impact the distribution of housework, especially in eastern China. Nevertheless, in western China, the effect of male gender norms on the distribution of housework is significantly more serious than that of female gender norms, which inspires the authors of this study to strengthen the male’s family consciousness education. All of the mentioned findings could help formulate region-differentiated policies and strategies to achieve more reasonably and sustainably distributed housework in China.

Doing Gender with Class: Gender Division of Unpaid Work in Russian Middle-Class Dual Earner Heterosexual Households

This article is concerned with examining the relation between gender division of unpaid work and class. Drawing on in-depth interviews with middle-class dual earner heterosexual couples conducted in Russia, I show how the gender division of housework and care could be shaped by processes of accountability not only to sex category (“doing gender”) but also to class category (“doing class”). I discuss how my interviewees perceived various gender contracts that have evolved in post-socialist Russia as profoundly classed. I further show how their resulting understandings of middle-class (in)appropriate ways of doing masculinity and femininity influenced the division of work in their families. Men were not only accountable as breadwinners but also as carers; while women, in addition to their caring roles, were accountable for their career and sex appeal. In several couples, this double gender and class accountability underpinned their comparatively more equal—although not necessarily more egalitarian—gender division of housework and care.

More work for Big Mother: Revaluing care and control in smart homes

The home is an ever-changing assemblage of technologies that shapes the organisation and division of housework and supports certain models of what that work entails, who does it and for what purposes. This paper analyses core tensions arising through the ways smart homes are embedding logics of digital capitalism into home life and labour. As a critical way of understanding these techno-political shifts in the means of social reproduction, we advance the concept of Big Mother – a system that, under the guise of maternal care, seeks to manage, monitor and marketise domestic spaces and practices. We identify three tensions arising in the relationships between care and control as they are mediated through the Big Mother system: (a) outsourcing autonomy through enhanced control and choice, (b) increased monitoring for efficient management and (c) revaluation of care through optimisation of housework. For each area, we explore how emerging technological capacities promise to enhance our abilities to care for our homes, families and selves. Yet, at the same time, these innovations also empower Big Mother to enrol people into new techniques of surveillance, new forms of automation and new markets of data. Our purpose in this paper is to push back against the influential ideas of smart homes based on luxury surveillance and caring systems by showing that they exist in constant relation with a supposedly antithetical version of the smart home represented by Big Mother.

Couples’ Relative Education and the Division of Domestic Work in France, Spain, and the United States

The reversal of the gender gap in education and the emergence of couples in which the woman has a better economic or education status than her partner have been key shifts in family dynamics in recent decades. One of the consequences of this phenomenon is a more egalitarian division of tasks within couples, which is derived from the stronger resources of more educated women to negotiate roles. In this paper, I explored the division of unpaid domestic work in couples in France, Spain, and the United States (US), taking into account the level of education and the income of both members of the couple. The results show that hypogamous couples by education are more egalitarian than other types of couples, but the reversal of the gender gap in education has a relative effect on the division of housework. In that sense, better status in terms of earnings supposes more equality within the couple. However, gender inequalities persist even when the woman makes more money than her partner. A higher level of income is not sufficient to obtain more equality within the household, and other normative changes must be implemented in societies.

Home, sweet home? The impact of working from home on the division of unpaid work during the COVID-19 lockdown

A lockdown implies a shift from the public to the private sphere, and from market to non-market production, thereby increasing the volume of unpaid work. Already before the pandemic, unpaid work was disproportionately borne by women. This paper studies the effect of working from home for pay (WFH), due to a lockdown, on the change in the division of housework and childcare within couple households. While previous studies on the effect of WFH on the reconciliation of work and family life and the division of labour within the household suffered from selection bias, we are able to identify this effect by drawing upon the shock of the first COVID-19 lockdown in Austria. The corresponding legal measures left little choice over WFH. In any case, WFH is exogenous, conditional on a small set of individual and household characteristics we control for. We employ data from a survey on the gendered aspects of the lockdown. The dataset includes detailed information on time use during the lockdown and on the quality and experience of WFH. Uniquely, this survey data also includes information on the division, and not only magnitude, of unpaid work within households. Austria is an interesting case in this respect as it is characterized by very conservative gender norms. The results reveal that the probability of men taking on a larger share of housework increases if men are WFH alone or together with their female partner. By contrast, the involvement of men in childcare increased only in the event that the female partner was not able to WFH. Overall, the burden of childcare, and particularly homeschooling, was disproportionately borne by women.

Gender role attitudes cannot explain how British couples responded to increased housework demands during the COVID-19 pandemic

Previous research has shown that gender role attitudes can predict changes in couples’ housework division over critical life events, but these studies might have suffered from endogeneity because the occurrence of such life events is anticipated and may be affected by gender role attitudes. In contrast, the COVID-19 pandemic was a truly exogenous shock that hit couples unexpectedly. This study examines the role of gender ideologies in how couples adjusted their division of housework during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 compared to a pre-pandemic baseline observation. The data cover 3,219 couples from the UK Household Longitudinal Study, with a baseline wave and four COVID-19 panel waves between April and September 2020. We found no evidence that individuals’ or couples’ pre-crisis gender role attitudes affected changes in men's and women's absolute or relative contributions to housework at any time during the lockdown. However, both partners spent substantially more time on housework throughout the COVID-19 crisis than before, especially in the early stages, and in relative terms, the pandemic seems to have contributed to at least a temporary, modest increase in gender equality in housework. We discuss our results against the background of previous research whose results may have suffered from endogeneity problems and argue that the COVID-19 ‘shock’ was likely perceived as a merely temporary disruption of couples' established housework arrangements.