The Unequal, Gendered Division of Domestic Work
- Linette Kang
- Feb 25, 2022
- 5 min read
We are taking major strides toward gender equality. Women have surpassed men in obtaining college degrees. Women have flocked to many formerly male-dominated occupations, such as law and medicine. And high school seniors today are more likely than their counterparts 40 years ago to claim they strongly believe that women should have the same opportunities as men to succeed in school and at work. Gender inequity has substantially decreased in institutions such as education and employment, and hence the distribution of paid work between partners became more equal on average. This, however, contrasts to institutions related to family and parenting that experienced a much slower adjustment. Ultimately, gender equality for women still lags in another realm: their own home. Multiple studies suggest that the revolution towards gender equality runs in two stages. The first part, in which women enter the public sphere of education, employment, and politics, has been largely accomplished. The second stage, in which men join the private sphere and take up their part of the responsibility for housework and childcare, lags behind.
That women should take on the bulk of domestic responsibilities is still a widespread belief. One way to understand how women’s success at work is treated at home is to look at heterosexual breadwinning wives - women who outearn their husbands. Many fall into this category, and it’s a group that has been steadily growing. However, when wives are professionally successful, couples are often reluctant to acknowledge the woman’s status as the breadwinner. In a particular study of families in which wives earned at least 80% of the total household income, researchers found that in just 385 of the couples did both the husband and the wife claim that breadwinner was an appropriate label for the woman. It wasn’t just the husbands who were skeptical of the term - wives were also less likely to think of themselves as breadwinners than were their husbands.
But why are people so reluctant to wholly claim this fact as truth? One reason is that most individuals continue to idealize and privilege a traditional family structure which comprises a male breadwinner and a female homemaker. Recognizing women as the primary wage earner at home threatens the idea that a family fits into said mold. When wives earn more than their husbands, couples often reframe the value of each spouse’s work to elevate the husband’s work as being more prestigious and downplaying the significance of the woman’s job. Moreover, breadwinning wives are also unable to achieve parity in how household chores are divided. As wives’ economic dependence on their husbands increases, the women tend to take tackle more housework. Dissimilarly, the more economically dependent men are on their wives, the less housework they do. As a result, working women are often faced with a double shift: Paid work on one hand, and household work involving childcare on the other. As they attempt to combine these various roles to a greater extent, it could lead to role nuisance, role conflicts, and the added necessity of planning and time pressure. An unequal household division of labor further hinders the ability of women to participate in public life and to obtain a greater role in the professional, social, and political atmosphere. In other words, women’s success in the workplace is penalized at home.
One explanation for this phenomenon is that by out-earning their husbands, wives worry that they are shattering norms on gender expectations. These comprise the same norms that are at play for men in female-dominated occupations, such as nursing, who are more likely than other men to conform to managing more masculine types of housework, such as power-hosing the deck or mowing the lawn. Women in male-dominated occupations, such as law enforcement, tend to do more feminine tasks such as cooking or washing the dishes. These men and women are correcting for their jobs by asserting their masculinity and femininity through housework.
But it’s not just men who are keen on enforcing the notion that they should be the family’s earner in chief. Correspondingly, wives contribute a crucial role in framing husbands as breadwinners too. While men’s unemployment was widely framed as a grave problem in need of immediate rectification, women’s unemployment was not. The case is often as follows - when wives who had been the breadwinner in their marriages lose their job, they would turn their focus onto their spouse’s business, instead of worrying about how they could find other jobs to ensure the family remains in a financially stable position. Although the wives’ educational credentials and prior work experience could indicate that they are realistically more positioned to employ the role as the family’s breadwinner, they would rather focus their attention on ensuring that the husbands’ careers were flourishing. And contrastingly, when a husband loses his job, there is a frenetic focus on his next job.
These dynamics reveal significant findings on gender inequality. We are inching toward gender equality because of profound changes in women’s lives - they’re the ones who, for instance, have forced their way into traditionally male-dominated fields. In contradictory, men’s lives have undergone less drastic changes over the past few decades. While men have somewhat increased their participation in housework, other aspects of their life– such as the imperative that they must earn and provide for their family– remain largely unchanged as they were since decades ago. When we think about fixing gender equality, they tend to direct their ire on the workplace. They concentrate on why the number of women in higher-level managerial positions has remained stubbornly stuck for the last few decades. They concentrate on discrimination in hiring decisions and biases in promotion policies. They concentrate on the pay gap between what men and women make for the same work. These workplace considerations are immensely important, but so too is what happens at home. Until we turn our attention to the home, where gender inequality remains deeply protected by old-school social norms, we will comprehend a merely incomplete picture of the problem, and in turn incomplete solutions for addressing it. Somewhat counterintuitively, addressing the gender gap at home can often be more difficult than in the workplace, since the issue is of inequality between spouses, not colleagues.
Better public policies will go a long way in spurring more equal practices in the home. As a society, we generally prefer arrangements where both spouses work and split housework. But this changes when people can’t rely on social supports such as paid family leave, subsidized child care, and flexible work arrangements. Without policies allowing them to pursue an egalitarian family life, men and women tend to fall back on unequal family arrangements that prioritize a male breadwinner and female homemaker.
But individuals can play a role in changing their own behavior within families. This gendered division of housework will not be made equal by women doing less, but by men doing more. Small moments in the home—the wife who tidies up the house when she notices a mess; the husband who mindlessly leaves his wet towel on the bathroom floor, assured that someone else is there to pick it up—lead to larger patterns of inequality within marriages. Daily habits matter, and without change they’ll continue to drag women down.
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