Making Care Count Duffy, Mignon
2011, 20110217, 2011-02-17, 20110101
eBook
There are fundamental tasks common to every society: children have to be raised, homes need to be cleaned, meals need to be prepared, and people who are elderly, ill, or disabled need care. Day in, ...day out, these responsibilities can involve both monotonous drudgery and untold rewards for those performing them, whether they are family members, friends, or paid workers. These are jobs that cannot be outsourced, because they involve the most intimate spaces of our everyday lives--our homes, our bodies, and our families.
Mignon Duffy uses a historical and comparative approach to examine and critique the entire twentieth-century history of paid care work--including health care, education and child care, and social services--drawing on an in-depth analysis of U.S. Census data as well as a range of occupational histories. Making Care Count focuses on change and continuity in the social organization along with cultural construction of the labor of care and its relationship to gender, racial-ethnic, and class inequalities. Debunking popular understandings of how we came to be in a "care crisis," this book stands apart as an historical quantitative study in a literature crowded with contemporary, qualitative studies, proposing well-developed policy approaches that grow out of the theoretical and empirical arguments.
Different Places, Different Voices challenges Western feminist and post-colonial approaches in its analysis of the changing lives of women of Asia, Africa, Latin America and Oceania. Recognising the ...significance of place, this is a book informed by the voices of female geographers from the developing world. Twenty case studies present regional perspectives on urban and rural development, household reproduction and production and community organisation. The theoretical and contextual approach and the emphasis on location and positionality highlight the differences created by place to suggest other ways of seeing.
This article explores changes to the domestic division of labour and how these are negotiated, following both female and male redundancy among heterosexual dual-earning couples in the north of ...England. Using a qualitative, longitudinal research design, we engage with and extend relative resource bargaining theory to consider its different manifestations in the negotiation process, in relation to ‘silent bargaining’ and collaborative decision making over time availability and earnings. Despite espousing egalitarian attitudes, couples were found to ‘do’ gender to varying extents, with women typically taking on greater shares of the domestic division of labour even in cases of male redundancy. In the absence of explicit negotiation, a range of implicit strategies to resist changes in the domestic division of labour was evident in some cases, alongside more overtly conflictual tactics to both evoke, and resist, change. In the main, men were found to be more instrumental in their attempts to secure a preferred domestic division of labour than women.
All social insects defend their colony from predators, parasites, and pathogens. In Oster and Wilson's classic work, they posed one of the key paradoxes about defense in social insects: Given the ...universal necessity of defense, why then is there so much diversity in mechanisms? Ecological factors undoubtedly are important: Predation and usurpation have imposed strong selection on eusocial insects, and active defense by colonies is a ubiquitous feature of all social insects. The description of diverse insect groups with castes of sterile workers whose main duty is defense has broadened the purview of social evolution in insects, in particular with respect to caste and behavior. Defense is one of the central axes along which we can begin to organize and understand sociality in insects. With the establishment of social insect models such as the honey bee, new discoveries are emerging regarding the endocrine, neural, and gene regulatory mechanisms underlying defense in social insects. The mechanisms underlying morphological and behavioral defense traits may be shared across diverse groups, providing opportunities for identifying both conserved and novel mechanisms at work. Emerging themes highlight the context dependency of and interaction between factors that regulate defense in social insects.
This special brings together innovative and multidisciplinary research (sociology, economics, and social work) using data from across Europe and the US to examine the potential flexible working has ...on the gender division of labour and workers’ work–life balance. Despite numerous studies on the gendered outcomes of flexible working, it is limited in that the majority is based on qualitative studies based in the US. The papers of this special issue overcome some of the limitations by examining the importance of context, namely, family, organisational and country context, examining the intersection between gender and class, and finally examining the outcomes for different types of flexible working arrangements. The introduction to this special issue provides a review of the existing literature on the gendered outcomes of flexible working on work life balance and other work and family outcomes, before presenting the key findings of the articles of this special issue. The results of the studies show that gender matters in understanding the outcomes of flexible working, but also it matters differently in different contexts. The introduction further provides policy implications drawn from the conclusions of the studies and some thoughts for future studies to consider.
That the COVID‐19 pandemic has affected the work conditions of large segments of society is in no doubt. A growing body of journalistic accounts raised the possibility that the lockdown caused by the ...pandemic has affected women and men in different ways, due mostly to the traditionally gendered division of labour in society. We attempt to test this oft‐cited argument by conducting an original survey with nearly 200 academics. Specifically, we explore the extent to which the effect of the lockdown on childcare, housework and home‐office environment varies across women and men. Our results show that a number of factors are associated with the effect of the lockdown on the work conditions of academics at home, including gender, having children, perceived threat from COVID‐19 and satisfaction with the work environment. We also show that having children disproportionately affects women in terms of the amount of housework during the lockdown.
Evidence from past economic crises indicates that recessions often affect men’s and women’s employment differently, with a greater impact on male-dominated sectors. The current COVID-19 crisis ...presents novel characteristics that have affected economic, health and social phenomena over wide swaths of the economy. Social distancing measures to combat the spread of the virus, such as working from home and school closures, have placed an additional tremendous burden on families. Using new survey data collected in April 2020 from a representative sample of Italian women, we analyse the effects of working arrangements due to COVID-19 on housework, childcare and home schooling among couples where both partners work. Our results show that most of the additional housework and childcare associated to COVID-19 falls on women while childcare activities are more equally shared within the couple than housework activities. According to our empirical estimates, changes to the amount of housework done by women during the emergency do not seem to depend on their partners’ working arrangements. With the exception of those continuing to work at their usual place of work, all of the women surveyed spend more time on housework than before. In contrast, the amount of time men devote to housework does depend on their partners’ working arrangements: men whose partners continue to work at their usual workplace spend more time on housework than before. The link between time devoted to childcare and working arrangements is more symmetric, with higher percentages of both women and men spending less time with their children if they continue to work away from home. For home schooling, too, parents who continue to go to their usual workplace after the lockdown are less likely to spend greater amounts of time with their children than before. Similar results emerge for the partners of women not working before the emergency. Finally, analysis of work–life balance satisfaction shows that working women with children aged 0–5 are those who find balancing work and family more difficult during COVID-19. The work–life balance is especially difficult to achieve for those with partners who continue to work outside the home during the emergency.
Unemployment has consequences for individuals, but its impacts also reverberate through families. This paper examines how families adapt to unemployment in one area of life—time in housework. Using ...74,881 observations from 10,390 couples in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we estimate fixed effects models and find that individuals spend between 3 and 7 hours more per week in housework when unemployed than when employed, with corresponding decreases ofl to 2 hours per week in the housework hours of unemployed individuals' spouses. We are the first to show that unemployment is associated both with a reallocation of housework to the unemployed spouse and an increase in the family's total household production time. The results also provide evidence for gender differences in adjustments to the division of labor during unemployment, with wives' unemployment associated with an increase in housework hours that is double the increase for unemployed husbands.
Objective: This study examines whether paternal part-time employment is related to greater involvement by fathers in child care and housework, both while fathers are working part-time and after they ...return to full-time employment. Background: The study draws on four strands of theory—time availability, bargaining, gender ideology, and gender construction. It studies couples' division of labor in Germany, where policies increasingly support a dual-earner, dual-carer model. Method: The study uses data from the German Socio-Economic Panel from 1991 to 2015 on employed adult fathers living together with at least one child younger than age 17 and the mother. The analytic sample comprises 51,230 observations on 8,915 fathers. Fixed effects regression techniques are used to estimate the effect of (previous) part-time employment on fathers' child-care hours, housework hours, and share of child care and housework. Results: Fathers did more child care and housework while they worked part time. Yet, most fathers reverted to previous levels of involvement after returning to full-time work. The only exception was fathers with partners in full-time employment, who spent more time doing child care and took on a greater share of housework after part-time employment than before. Conclusion: The findings are largely consistent with the time availability perspective, although the results for fathers with full-time employed partners indicate that the relative resources and gender ideology perspectives have some explanatory power as well.
As part of a special issue marking the 90th anniversary of Social Forces, articles published in the journal during the past five decades that have been especially significant statements on important ...topics are highlighted. In this article, Suzanne M. Bianchi, Liana C. Sayer, Melissa A. Milkie and John P. Robinson reflect on their article "Is Anyone Doing the Housework? Trends in the Gender Division of Household Labor" Social Forces 79:191-228. Adapted from the source document.
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