Blog 5

            In my last blog I said that I wanted to look at how education played a role in the division of labor in households, but I could not find a good empirical article to explain the reasoning behind it. Instead I found an article discussing different research that has been done talking about the reasons for division of labor. Coltrane (2010) talks about different studies that he has examined and picked them apart to find some reasoning behind gender roles in the home.

            His article talks about social science studies and developmental household labor studies.  As I talked about in my last blog, Coltrane (2010) discusses the importance of Micro and Macro links. Again Micro is your gender ideology and Macro is social learning policies.  The article talks about a study done by Lachance-Grzela and Bouchard (2010), which was briefly discussed in my last blog as well.  Coltrane (2010) quotes Lachange-Grzela and Bouchard (2010) saying, “Because most of the household labor falls on their shoulders, women are typically in a relatively unfavorable position compared to men to pursue demanding career opportunities and professional advancement.”  Research has also shown that it seems that the micro level factors seems to be the more important influences on division of labor and gender roles.  Once again this article shows research that the higher income that women have the more they are able to negotiates division of household chores.

            Coltrane (2010) talks about different studies that look at social structure and the Theories of Gender Inequality and how they affect gender roles in the home. Research shows that politics, economics, families, marriage, and neighborhoods are shaped between the relationship between men and women.  Bem (1993) and Lorber (1994) discuss how cognitive processes, individual attributes, dyadic relationships, societal institutions, economic markets, and political systems are also all shaped by gender.  In this article there is also talk about gender regimes (Connel 1987). The three regimes are labor, power, and Cathexis.  Power comes from the gender stereotypes in the work place, and how men ten to have more power than women no matter what the job is. Labor derives from work and household chores and which gender does it more, and finally Cathexis organizes sexuality and emotional attachment. All of these three regimes according to Connell (1987) are the ways in which gender roles are decided by.

            Lastly Coltrane (2010) talks about the Gender Organization of Production, which includes factors such as, male and female work, compatibility of productive labor and gender segregation of productive labor. This basically means that division of labor depends on the job of the man and women, how they perceive each other in the chores, and how much each partner is willing to do. This is not much different than other studies that I have looked at in my blogs. Overall I have found this research to be basically the same as all of the other articles that I have looked at. In conclusion I have found that division of labor depends on education, personal views, and how you grew up. These three things seem to be the main factors in the separation of chores between genders. 

 The following link brings you to a video that shows gender stereotypes in women. Sorry that the video is not on here, it would not post for some reason. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Hs5qH2B7LQ&feature=player_detailpage

References

Coltrane, S. (2010). Gender theory and household labor. Sex Roles, 63(11-12), 791-800. doi:10.1007/s11199-010-9863-6

Post 4

The cartoon above relates to the article that I am going to talk about in this blog post. The cartoon illustration depicts the everyday life of a stereotypical women at home doing all of the chores and waiting on her husband. The article by Bouchard (2010) discusses a bunch of different studies on women and why they do most of the housework. Some of the studies are done by Kamo (2000), Mannino and Deutsch (2007), and many more in which I will discuss.

            In her article, Bouchard (2010) looks at all of these different studies to find the reason as to why women do the majority of the housework and if this is actually true, and what factors affect division of labor.  She talks about how one of the biggest social changes has been the increase of women joining the workforce, but does this change the labor done at home? According to research American women said that they performed an average of 13.2 hours of household chores per week while men reported 6.6 hours, so you see that there still is not an equal split for division of labor. However it has decreased since 1965 when it used to be 17.5 hours for women, and men has increased from 4.9 hours a week.

            Bouchard (2010) talks about how different theories should be taken into consideration when researching the division of labor. Two the theories discussed most are micro-level perspective, and the macro-level perspective. The micro-level perspective what the spouses external influences are such as, income and education.  Bianchi et al. (2000) research supports that women who receive an income is directly linked to the amount of household work that they do.  Parkman (2004) research also shows that income is linked to the time they spend on household chores. The article also talks about how education plays a role in how men and women view division of labor. Bianchi et al. (2000) research shows that the more women are educated the less gender gap there is in the amount of household chores that they and they spouse complete.  The research that has been completed however, shows that if a women and a man are bringing in the same income the women still does the majority of the housework (Bartley et al. 2005).

           

            The focus on education and occupation in research has faithfully shown that women still are the ones who are completing the majority of the household work. Bouchard (2010) also wanted to look at macro-level perspective, which is the idea, that culture and where a person is from has a big influence on how they perceive gender roles. Hook (2006) showed that men who lived in countries where a woman in the workforce was more common participated in more of the household chores. Also another big finding shown in this article was that is was rare for couples to share household chores in countries that were conservative welfare-state regimes and were more active in traditional gender roles such as, Japan, Italy, and Austria. On the other hand, however, people who were from social-democratic regimes, countries like, Sweden, and Norway, were more active in advocating gender equity, and finally couples who were from liberal regimes were more focused on individuality, countries who were more liberal are, Australia, Canada, and the United States (Geist 2005).

            So far in my studies I am starting to see a pattern that occupation, education, and where you live seem to play a big role in gender stereotypes and the division of labor. For my next blog post I would like to explore the education aspect a little more, to see what it is that makes more educated men and women be more egalitarian.

Lachance-Grzela, M., & Bouchard, G. (2010). Why do women do the lion’s share of housework? A decade of research. Sex Roles, 63(11-12), 767-780. doi:10.1007/s11199-010-9797-z