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