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

Post 3

        This post is going to be more directed towards how accurate the stereotype is. Below there is a video that shows clips of commercials that show gender stereotypes in the home. Sometimes I think people tend to over look stereotype in commercials and Television programs.  The commercials portrayed in the video clip show woman’s roles as the caretaker and shows men as the working and sitting around relaxing. My personally opinion is that this is true, but not to the extent in which the commercials make it seem, I feel that we have made progress.

        The article I looked at for this blog was about a study done in Taiwan by Hu and Kamo (2007). The study looked at married men and woman in Taiwan and their positions on household labor, and compared them to those of western civilization in the United States.  The article states that the rate of females in the workforce has increased from 32.6% in 1966 to 46.1% in 2001; this goes to show that there is some improvement with women working.  Hu and Kamo (2007) had five different hypotheses for their experiment, but only a few go along with the stereotype. The first was “Egalitarian gender ideology is positively related to men’s relative share of household work but negatively related to women’s,” and the second was “Individuals occupational status is negatively related to their share of household work,” Hu and Kamo (2007).

       The study was done through a survey called the Taiwan Social Change Survey, and it was conducted by the Institute of Ethnology of Academia Sinca of the Republic of China.   There were fifty two cities that were randomly chosen to participate in the research, and from the cities there were ninety eight villages selected. The study consisted of 1008 males and 916 females between the ages of twenty and seventy five. The participants were all married.  Hu and Kamo (2007) asked questions such as who does the shopping for groceries, laundry, home improvement tasks, taking care of the children, and more.

       Hu and Kamo (2007) found that Taiwanese women seemed to have more egalitarian gender ideology than men did. The results also showed that there was a large difference between men’s and women’s occupational status, income, and household work time. 42% of married women were full time housewives and they themselves estimated that they performed 72% of the household chores and their husbands did about 28% of the chores. Men, however, felt that they did about 35% of the household chores.  The results proved hypothesis two to be correct, it showed that woman’s participation in household work declined if they had a higher occupational job. Hu and Kamo’s (2007) study also showed that men who were more educated were found to do more housework.

      Overall the study states that Taiwan division of household labor perspectives can be related to those of the Western societies.  The only difference they found was that occupational status does not seem to matter as much in the United States; it is more of individuals’ views on the matter.  The discussion section states that woman who have higher occupational status may have more power because they can negotiate the division of household chores with their spouse.

        I did find this study interesting in that it goes to show that Western Societies are not the only ones with the stereotype of the stay at home moms and the working dads. One of the most interesting findings I thought was that occupation status plays a role in the division of labor in Taiwan. I hope to explore more of the United States views on the division of labor in my next post.



This is the Video that talked about in the first paragraph. Check it out!

References

Hu, C., & Kamo, Y. (2007). The division of household labor in Taiwan. Journal of Comparative Family Studies, 38(1), 105-124. Retrieved from EBSCOhost.

Post 2

      As I stated in my first blog post I wanted to look at how stereotypes in the home affected children. I wanted to know if children followed what their parents do, and how they think about stereotypes. Sinno and Killen (2009) performed a study on children in different grades on their perceptions of stereotypes within the home. In their review of other literature they found that even though women’s role in the work force has increased in the United States, there is still division of labor within the home. Sinno, and Killen (2009) also found in their reviews that parents are the biggest contributor to children’s knowledge of gender roles. 

      The purpose of their study was to find out what children’s judgments were about career and caretaker roles, relating to their own life of parents and what role they played. Sinno and Killen (2009) hypothesized that the desire to work a full time job is acceptable for both parents, that children would view fathers who wanted to stay at home and be a caretaker as unacceptable, also they thought that children would use more gender stereotypes views when mothers and fathers desired stereotypical roles, and then a more personal choice view when parents chose a counter-stereotypical role. Sinno and Killen (2009) also believed that children would see making dinner as more of a stereotypical chore for woman to do, and it would be more acceptable for woman to take on masculine roles. In their research Sinno and Killen (2009) wanted to look at difference of age and their views on gender roles. 

       To conduct their study they took 67 second graders and 54 fifth graders. The students were interviewed for 30 minutes by a trained female research assistant. The students were given four different scenarios. Two of which focused on female stereotyped parental role, such as making dinner, and cleaning and the other two focused on male stereotype roles, such as working full time. After given the scenarios the students were asked questions, for example is it alright for both mom and dad to want full time jobs, and stay at home.

        Sinno and Killen (2009) results found that it was more acceptable for mothers to stay at home with the children and that the fathers should be outside of the home working a full time job. The results showed that the children fell into the stereotype that woman should be the stay at home moms and dads should be out making money for the family, and that it was not acceptable for that role to switch. Looking at age, however, the fifth graders found it more acceptable for a father to want to stay at home. The date also proved their hypothesis of traditional families who follow stereotypical roles, and untraditional families. Children who grew up in a traditional family were more apt to look at mothers being the caretakers and fathers being the worker as the way to go, when untraditional families were more for personal choice. 

        Overall this study shows that stereotypes in the home do strongly affect what children believe, even though as they seem to get older they are more flexible towards different ideas. I want to look more into different studies to see just how these stereotypes affect different people. I think it would be interesting to see how gender roles in the home are seen in different countries, and also do a little more research on gender roles and the affect on children and their beliefs.




Reference:
Sinno, S. M., & Killen, M. (2009). Moms at work and dads at home: Children's evaluations of parental roles. Applied Developmental Science, 13(1), 16-29. doi:10.1080/10888690802606735

Welcome Post 1

 

I have chosen family roles in the home as my stereotype to research throughout the semester. In our culture men are seen as the bread winners. They go out and work all day and bring home the money. Women are stay at home moms, caring for the children, cleaning the house, and preparing dinner for when her husband comes home.  I am interested in researching this stereotype because I grew up in a family where both my mother and father worked. My mother never cooked, it has always been my dad, and everyone in my family did chores. 

I want to research this topic and find out if this stereotype is actually true, and if so to what extent. How many families have the traditional stay at home mom, and working dad? Today you see more women with jobs, and the balance of work and family. 

I also want to look at how this stereotype affects children. A child who grows up with a working mom and dad compared to a child who has grown up with a stay at home mom and working dad. What are the differences in these two children’s development are they affected by family roles? What if they had a stay at home dad?  Do children grow up thinking that they must do as their family?

 All of these questions are going to be explored throughout the semester.  Are woman suppose to be stay at home moms? Are children affected by what their parents do? Are these even real stereotypes?