rockzilla
Brilliant_Rock
- Joined
- Nov 19, 2006
- Messages
- 1,286
Very interesting article about parents choosing/attempting to choose equality in amount of time spent doing child care and housework.
Some figures (taken from the article):
-The average wife does 31 hours of housework a week while the average husband does 14 — a ratio of slightly more than two to one
-Couples in which wives stay home and husbands are the sole earners, the number of hours goes up for women, to 38 hours of housework a week, and down a bit for men, to 12, a ratio of more than three to one.
-Couples in which both husband and wife have full-time paying jobs. There, the wife does 28 hours of housework and the husband, 16. Just shy of two to one, which makes no sense at all.
- “And the most sadly comic data is from my own research,” he [Sociology professor] adds, which show that in married couples “where she has a job and he doesn’t, and where you would anticipate a complete reversal, even then you find the wife doing the majority of the housework.”"
Similar findings hold true for child care - the article also tackles why this may be, and also looks at some common explanations for it, such as "she has a more flexible job" or "its her housecleaning standards.":
"what seems like an external institutional barrier to equal sharing becomes something else entirely. He makes more money than she does, so of course she should be the one to step back her career; she has a more flexible line of work than he does, so of course she should be the one to work part time. Those may seem like choices, but they have their roots in social norms.
“They weren’t born in those jobs; they chose them,” Deutsch [sociologist]says. What decision tree, planted decades earlier and steeped in unspoken assumption, she wonders, led him to be a surgeon and her to be a social worker? What led her to work in a field where four-day weeks are common and him to work where they are unheard of?"
She goes on to suggest that the perception of flexibility is itself a matter of perception. In her study, she was struck by how often the wife’s job was seen by both spouses as being more flexible than the husband’s. By way of example she describes two actual couples, one in which he is a college professor and she is a physician and one in which she is a college professor and he is a physician. In either case, Deutsch says “both the husband and wife claimed the man’s job was less flexible.”
She has a similar response to those who say that they would love to share equally but that one parent — almost always the wife — has parenting or housekeeping standards that the other cannot (or will not) meet. Dad dresses the children wrong and diapers them wrong and sends inadequate thank-you notes and leaves the house a mess. This may look like a cranky power struggle, Deutsch says, but the dynamic, which sociologists call “gatekeeping,” also reflects social pressures.
Women, she says, know that the world is watching and judging. If the toddler’s clothes don’t match, if the thank-you notes don’t get written, if the house is a shambles, it is seen as her fault, making her overly invested in the outcome"
What do you think? Is it societal pressures and social norms that lead to these sorts of overwhelming inequities? I''d rather not jump on the "men are lazy" bandwagon here...obviously it is hard to break out of these societal norms..but I have a feeling that many women out there have convinced themselves that they''re "OK" with this division of labor...perhaps for the same reason we''re "OK" with doing the majority of wedding planning, etc. "I''m more interested in it" "I''m better at it" "He just won''t get things done to my standards" - but how frequently are these not only your standards, but the standards of the outside world?
All bolding added by me - link to the original article here:
When Mom and Dad share it All
Some figures (taken from the article):
-The average wife does 31 hours of housework a week while the average husband does 14 — a ratio of slightly more than two to one
-Couples in which wives stay home and husbands are the sole earners, the number of hours goes up for women, to 38 hours of housework a week, and down a bit for men, to 12, a ratio of more than three to one.
-Couples in which both husband and wife have full-time paying jobs. There, the wife does 28 hours of housework and the husband, 16. Just shy of two to one, which makes no sense at all.
- “And the most sadly comic data is from my own research,” he [Sociology professor] adds, which show that in married couples “where she has a job and he doesn’t, and where you would anticipate a complete reversal, even then you find the wife doing the majority of the housework.”"
Similar findings hold true for child care - the article also tackles why this may be, and also looks at some common explanations for it, such as "she has a more flexible job" or "its her housecleaning standards.":
"what seems like an external institutional barrier to equal sharing becomes something else entirely. He makes more money than she does, so of course she should be the one to step back her career; she has a more flexible line of work than he does, so of course she should be the one to work part time. Those may seem like choices, but they have their roots in social norms.
“They weren’t born in those jobs; they chose them,” Deutsch [sociologist]says. What decision tree, planted decades earlier and steeped in unspoken assumption, she wonders, led him to be a surgeon and her to be a social worker? What led her to work in a field where four-day weeks are common and him to work where they are unheard of?"
She goes on to suggest that the perception of flexibility is itself a matter of perception. In her study, she was struck by how often the wife’s job was seen by both spouses as being more flexible than the husband’s. By way of example she describes two actual couples, one in which he is a college professor and she is a physician and one in which she is a college professor and he is a physician. In either case, Deutsch says “both the husband and wife claimed the man’s job was less flexible.”
She has a similar response to those who say that they would love to share equally but that one parent — almost always the wife — has parenting or housekeeping standards that the other cannot (or will not) meet. Dad dresses the children wrong and diapers them wrong and sends inadequate thank-you notes and leaves the house a mess. This may look like a cranky power struggle, Deutsch says, but the dynamic, which sociologists call “gatekeeping,” also reflects social pressures.
Women, she says, know that the world is watching and judging. If the toddler’s clothes don’t match, if the thank-you notes don’t get written, if the house is a shambles, it is seen as her fault, making her overly invested in the outcome"
What do you think? Is it societal pressures and social norms that lead to these sorts of overwhelming inequities? I''d rather not jump on the "men are lazy" bandwagon here...obviously it is hard to break out of these societal norms..but I have a feeling that many women out there have convinced themselves that they''re "OK" with this division of labor...perhaps for the same reason we''re "OK" with doing the majority of wedding planning, etc. "I''m more interested in it" "I''m better at it" "He just won''t get things done to my standards" - but how frequently are these not only your standards, but the standards of the outside world?
All bolding added by me - link to the original article here:
When Mom and Dad share it All
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