Perceiving the division of family work to be unfair: Do social comparisons, enjoyment, and competence matter? (original) (raw)

What Contributes to the (Im)Balanced Division of Family Work Between the Sexes?

Swiss journal of psychology : official publication of the Swiss Psychological Society Schweizerische Zeitschrift fur Psychologie = Revue suisse de psychologie, 2009

This study examines a comprehensive set of variables that have been proposed as explaining the imbalance of the division of family work between the sexes. The analyses use survey data of 735 dual-earner couples from Austria, the Netherlands, and Portugal. The results support theoretical explanations referring to time availability, gender ideology, relative resources, and the importance of characteristics of the family system. No support was obtained for the doing-gender perspective. Additional findings suggest that increased consideration of psychological concepts adds to the understanding of why women do more family work than men. The analyses revealed similarities, but also differences between the factors that contribute to the division of household labor and childcare.

Sharing of home responsibilities between professionally employed women and their husbands

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1991

A sample of139 married couples with young children and with relatively equal status careers (wives were university professors or businesswomen) were interviewed about work and home life. Considerable, traditional inequity in the distribution of child-care tasks and chore responsibility was noted, but women were generally satisfied with their husbands' home involvement. In the academic sample, the longer hours each spouse worked, the more child care the mher performed; in the business sample, child-care involvement was largely determined by the husband's work hours, income, and education. Overall, women were more self-critical than were men about their performance in home roles, and women~ role performance was rated more highly by husbands than by themselves. Women professionals' continued use of traditional sex role standards and the importance of attending to both partners' perspectives in studies of married life arc discussed.

What Determines the Perception of Fairness Regarding Household Division of Labor between Spouses?

Married women often undertake a larger share of housework in many countries and yet they do not always perceive the inequitable division of household labor to be “unfair.” Several theories have been proposed to explain the pervasive perception of fairness that is incongruent with the observed inequity in household tasks. These theories include 1) economic resource theory, 2) time constraint theory, 3) gender value theory, and 4) relative deprivation theory. This paper re-examines these theories with newly available data collected on Japanese married women in 2014 in order to achieve a new understanding of the gendered nature of housework. It finds that social comparison with others is a key mechanism that explains women’s perception of fairness. The finding is compatible with relative deprivation theory. In addition to confirming the validity of the theory of relative deprivation, it further uncovers that a woman’s reference groups tend to be people with similar life circumstances rather than non-specific others. The perceived fairness is also found to contribute to the sense of overall happiness. The significant contribution of this paper is to explicate how this seeming contradiction of inequity in the division of housework and the perception of fairness endures.

Is Work-Family Policy Use Related to the Gendered Division of Housework

Day Care & Early Education, 2007

Researchers have proposed that work-family policy use may either reinforce or challenge the existing gendered division of labor within couples, but results from prior studies have been inconclusive. Using data from a regional survey of work and family life, we extend this research by focusing on how housework is divided within couples and by differentiating between traditionally female-and male-typed housework tasks. Results show that among dual-earning women, policy use is not related to share of female-or male-typed tasks. Among dual-earning men, policy use is positively related to share of female-typed tasks and negatively related to share of male-typed tasks. These findings suggest that work-family policy use does not reinforce the gendered division of housework.

Gender Differences in Perceived Domestic Task Equity

Journal of Family Issues, 2013

Despite inequalities in domestic work, a majority of couples perceive this arrangement as fair. Our study addresses this paradox by examining whether and why married lawyers perceive domestic work arrangements as unfair to themselves or their spouse. Our results reveal that predictors of perceived equity to self and spouse differ substantially and that the antecedents of perceptions of unfairness vary by gender. That is, women working longer hours are more likely than men to perceive the distribution of tasks as unfair to their spouse. Furthermore, the association between spouse’s time-based conflict and perceived task equity is greater for men than women at lower levels of spouse’s time-based conflict, though the effects converge for men and women at higher levels of time-based conflict. Our findings highlight the value in taking a more nuanced approach to studying perceived inequity in the distribution of domestic tasks among men and women.

Exploring the division of household labor outside the family context: utilizing resources for doing gender

Community, Work & Family, 2012

This study tests alternative theoretical models of the division of household labor within a non-familial context of men and women operating homes for autistic children and adults. This context makes it possible to disentangle overlapping hypotheses that stem from competing models. A sample of 128 staff members completed extensive questionnaires. The analyses yielded considerably different patterns of results for men and women. The results for the men provided support for the relative resources model, showing that men's contributions to household labor decreased as their resources increased. The results for the women provided support for the human capital model, showing that women's contributions increased as their resources increased. The gender construction approach may account for these gender differences in the determinants of involvement, suggesting that men and women utilize their resources for 'doing gender'.

Gender Inequality in Household Chores and Work-Family Conflict

Frontiers in psychology, 2018

The fact that the permeability between family and work scopes produces work-family conflict (WFC) is well established. As such, this research aims to check whether the unequal involvement in household chores between men and women is associated with increased WFC in women and men, interpreting the results also from the knowledge that arise from gender studies. A correlational study was carried out by means a questionnaire applied to 515 subjects (63% men) of two independent samples of Spanish men and women without emotional relationship, who lived with their heterosexual partner. As expected, results firstly show unequal involvement in household chores by women and men as it is higher in women that in men, and the perception of partner involvement is lower in women that in men. Secondly, those unequal involvements relate differently to men and women on different ways of work-family interaction. They do not increase WFC in women comparing to men, although there are tangentially signif...

Sex Role Orientation, Wife's Employment, and the Division of Household Labor

Home Economics Research Journal, 1985

... None of the variables studied predicted wives' satisfaction with housework or childcare. JaneClarkson Perlmutter, Karen Smith Wampler Authors' Address: Department of Child and Family Development, College of Home Economics, University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602. ...