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