Women's Housework: New Tests of Time and Money

The author uses variation by the day of week—comparing weekdays to weekends—to reconsider three main explanations for variation in women's housework time. The author predicts that though evidence of gender deviance neutralization (GDN) should be evident across the days of the week, evidence of time constraints and absolute earnings should be most apparent on weekdays. The author tests these hypotheses with the largest sample to date (American Time Use Survey 2003–2012) and careful consideration of the functional form between resources/constraints and housework time. The author finds that all three measures of resources/constraints—relative earnings, absolute earnings, and employment hours—perform as poor predictors of women's housework on weekends. Weekends are when women, regardless of employment status, do gender, but not in the way hypothesized by GDN. On weekdays, women's own employment hours and earnings have negative, but diminishing, effects on their housework time. GDN is not supported.     

Housework,Housewives, and Domestic Workers

ABSTRACT

This article sets established historical narratives of a mid-twentieth-century turn to privacy, new domestic identities, and new ways of thinking about housework into a broader history of domestic service. I argue that the new forms of domesticity were only ever partially and unevenly established in middle-class households. Domestic service emerges as a tenacious institution, which continued to be influential in the organization of middle-class or privileged homes throughout the mid- to late twentieth century. Middle-class women were exhorted to manage their homes without servants, and were offered the consolation of greater privacy and intimacy within their homes, as well as the dignity and emotional rewards of a housewife identity. But few found that this made the prospect of being “servantless” attractive. I will therefore examine the failures of the “servantless” home and the “strange survival” of domestic service in twentieth-century Britain.     

Cohabitation and Housework: The Effects of Marital Intentions

This study asks how cohabiters’ housework patterns vary by their marital intentions. I draw on interactionist theories that view housework as an activity that produces gender and family to hypothesize that cohabiters who are more invested in their relationships will spend more time on housework. Analyzing the 1987–1988 National Survey of Families and Households (N = 348), I find that, controlling for sociodemographic and household differences, men who are least committed to their relationships spend the least time on housework, whereas women's housework time is not affected by marital intentions.     

Gender and Children's Housework Time in China: Examining Behavior Modeling in Context

Differentiated gender roles in adulthood are rooted in one's gender role socialization. In order to understand the persistence of gender inequalities in the domestic sphere, we need to examine the gendered patterns of children's housework time. Although researchers have identified behavior modeling as a major mechanism of gender role reproduction and characterized gender socialization as a contextually embedded process, few have investigated contextual variation in behavior modeling, particularly in non‐Western developing countries. Analyzing data from the China Family Panel Studies 2010, the author examined the differences in behavior modeling between boys and girls age 10–15 from 2‐parent families (N = 1,903) in rural and urban China. The results revealed distinctive gendered interplays in the way parental housework and employment behavior helps shape children's housework time. This analysis is a crucial illustration of how the distinctive sociocultural contexts of rural and urban China moderate the effects of housework‐behavior modeling on intergenerational gender role socialization.     

Life Course Transitions and Housework: Marriage,Parenthood, and Time on Housework

We examine the effects of transitions in marital and parenthood status on 1,091 men’s and women’s housework hours using two waves of data from an Australian panel survey titled Negotiating the Life Course. We examine transitions between cohabitation and marriage, and from cohabitation or marriage to separation, as well as transitions to first and higher‐order births. We find extraordinary stability in men’s housework time across most transitions but considerable change for women in relation to transitions in parenthood. Our results suggest that the transition to parenthood is a critical moment in the development of an unequal gap in time spent on routine household labor.     

Opting Out and Buying Out: Wives' Earnings and Housework Time

It has been proposed that the negative association between wives' earnings and their time in housework is due to greater outsourcing of household labor by households with high-earning wives, but this hypothesis has not been tested directly. In a sample of dual-earner married couples in the Consumption and Activities Mail Survey of the Health and Retirement Study (N = 796), use of market substitutes for women's housework was found to be only weakly associated with wives' time cooking and cleaning. Furthermore, expenditures on market substitutes explain less than 15% of the earnings-housework time relationship. This suggests that use of market substitutes plays a smaller role in explaining variation in wives' time in household labor than has previously been hypothesized.     

Under Pressure: Gender Differences in the Relationship Between Free Time and Feeling Rushed

Free time has the potential to reduce time pressures, yet previous studies paradoxically report increases in free time concurrent with increases in feeling rushed. Using U.S. time diary data from 708 individuals in 1975 and 964 individuals in 1998, we review the evidence on trends in free time and subjective perceptions of feeling rushed, and reexamine the relationship between free time and time pressure. We find that women's time pressure increased significantly between 1975 and 1998 but men's did not. In addition, the effects of objective time constraints vary by gender. Whereas more free time reduces men's perceptions of feeling rushed at both time points, among women, free time marginally reduced time pressure in 1975 but no longer reduced time pressure in 1998. Our findings suggest that persistent inequality in gendered time‐use patterns is paralleled by gendered experiences of time pressure.     

The gender division of housework after the first child: a comparison among Bulgaria,France and the Netherlands

ABSTRACT

In our study, we adopt a comparative-longitudinal perspective on the gender division of housework before and after the birth of the first child, exploiting the first two waves of the Gender and Generation Survey and comparing three countries belonging to different gender and welfare regimes (i.e. Bulgaria, France and the Netherlands). We find that childrearing everywhere triggers a re-traditionalisation, generating a more inegalitarian gender division of housework, yet with interesting differences across countries. Fixed-effect regression analyses of the pooled data show that changes when becoming parents are less pronounced in France with respect to Bulgaria and the Netherlands, more pronounced when she is low-educated. Moreover, when countries are analysed separately, it emerges that it is only in the Netherlands that traditionalisation around first childbirth is significantly lower in couples where the woman is middle- and high-educated compared to those where she is low-educated. Economic, cultural and institutional contexts do matter. Traditionalisation and within-couples polarisation is weaker in contexts where non-traditional attitudes are widespread, social policies are more defamilialising and more explicitly addressed also to men, and where part-time is not the main reconciliation strategy, as in France.     

Time,Space, and Memories

ABSTRACT

This article traces the ways that gendered and generational family practices were remembered across time in the context of working-class homes in Victorian Britain. Two everyday domestic objects—the father's chair and the grandfather clock—are examined and analyzed, drawing on John Gillis' work on ritualized family spaces and contested notions of time (Gillis 1996). Both these objects resonate with the contested use of domestic space and the layered meanings of family time in working-class lives, not least because both are often remembered in autobiographical accounts of home and family. The special place of the father's chair highlighted the feminizing of the home and accompanying development of rituals to welcome and ensconce the father in his domestic domain each day. The sound of clocks underpinned the bringing together of industrial time, separating leisure and work for those at school or employment away from home, and at the same time conveying the cyclical nature of family life and its everyday routines from day to day, year to year, and generation to generation. Memories of chairs and clocks embedded in autobiographies offer important evidence about the images, sounds, and sensory experiences that resonated most powerfully when remembering and composing the hierarchies and tensions of working-class family life.     

‘Domestic friends’: women's friendships,motherhood and inclusive intimacy

Based on a qualitative, interview‐based study of friendship, this article examines the specificity of ‘domestic friendships’ between women. Forged from the particular experiences, emotions and challenges of motherhood, they are qualitatively different from most friendships which tend to be based on individualistic connection and self‐expression. Domestic friendships facilitate a specific form of ‘inclusive intimacy’ and shape an expansive experience of domestic life beyond the family or household. They help shape mothers’ sense of self as profoundly relational and interconnected with others, and channel a sense of biographical selfhood whose form and temporality is tied firmly to others’ lives.     

Feeling Rushed: Gendered Time Quality,Work Hours,Nonstandard Work Schedules,and Spousal Crossover

The authors investigated gender differences in couple parents' subjective time pressure, using detailed Australian time use data (n=756 couples with minor children). They examined how family demand, employment hours, and nonstandard work schedules of both partners relate to each spouse's non‐employment time quality (“pure” leisure, “contaminated” leisure, multitasking housework, and child care) and subjective feelings of being rushed or pressed for time. Mothers averaged more contaminated leisure and less pure leisure and did much more unpaid work multitasking than fathers. These results suggest that these differences in time quality do partially account for mothers feeling more rushed than fathers. Weekend work was associated with mothers having less pure leisure, but not contaminated leisure. The opposite was found for fathers. Spousal work characteristics also related to time use and feeling rushed in gendered ways, with male long work hours positively associated with higher time pressure for mothers as well as the fathers who worked them.     

Technology,Gender and Time: A Contribution to the Debate

Using the data collected from research carried out at two Portuguese universities, this article highlights the way university lecturers currently deal with space and time. Their professional activity is not externally subjected to a specific time geometry that defines their working day. Teaching and researching time–spaces are basically task oriented. Furthermore, university lecturers are increasingly requested to perform tasks in very short time periods in order to secure financial support. To a certain extent, this pressure upon their work is facilitated by the use of technology. However, technology also causes a profound reconfiguration of working times and spaces, especially because it allows lecturers to work at any time from anywhere. This not only renders university physical spaces and times virtual, but it also leads to the colonization of several other time–spaces of their social lives. This article analyses the ambivalence and difficulty of managing time–spaces, as described by the lecturers themselves, with the objective of providing a more accurate awareness of the implications of technology on their lives, as well as the hazards of the progressive externalization of academic work, particularly for women.     

Time,Money and the Gender Order: Work Orientations and Working‐Time Preferences in Britain

In the context of economic restructuring and the reorganization of working time, the question of working‐time preferences is emerging as an important component of both academic and policy debates. Much of the debate about preferences is based upon conjuncture or inadequate indicators, often drawing oppositional models of gender differences in preferences which neglect the similarities between the sexes. This article starts by developing a framework for interpreting preference formation and change, with particular emphasis on the societal institutional system and existing national working‐time regime in which individuals' behaviour and preferences are located. This framework is then applied to highlight the particular features of the national working‐time regime and associated ‘gender order’ in Britain, followed by an analysis of gender similarities and differences in work orientations and working‐time preferences in this country. The results show that work orientations and working‐time preferences are related to labour market circumstances for both sexes. Similarity between women and men in the influences of workplace variables coexists with a gender‐differentiated effect of household circumstances on the types of work schedules preferred; childcare and domestic responsibilities figure more largely in women's accounts of their preferences than in men's. For both, however, the most popular reform would be increased time sovereignty in the organization of their work schedules.     

Exercise Time: Gender Differences in the Effects of Marriage,Parenthood, and Employment

Using data from a supplement to the 1995 National Health Interview Survey, this article examines the relationship among three major work and family roles—marriage, parenthood, and employment—and time spent on exercise among American men and women ages 18 to 64 (N = 13,496). As the time availability perspective suggests, work and family roles curtail time for exercise. Married adults spend less time on exercising than unmarried adults. Although the number of children is not related to time spent on exercising, having children under age 5 is negatively associated with exercising. Long hours of employment are also related to less time spent on exercising, although the effect is small. Across the board, women spend less time on exercising than men, but the negative association of work and family roles, especially the role of spouse, with time for exercise is greater for men than for women.     

Determinants of Charitable Donations to Large U.S. Higher Education,Hospital, and Scientific Research NPOs: New Evidence from Panel Data

We provide improved evidence on effects that fund-raising, government support, and program revenue of U.S. higher education, hospital, and scientific research nonprofit organizations (NPOs) have on donations to those NPOs and provide improved estimates of price elasticities of donations to, and donor demand for output of, those NPOs. Applying econometric tests, we find the best-specified model is two-way fixed effects, which controls for organization-specific and time-specific factors. Results suggest that U.S. higher education, hospital, and scientific research NPOs fund-raise to the point where the marginal fund-raising dollar brings in zero dollars of donations, donor demand for output of hospitals and scientific research NPOs is price inelastic and price elastic, respectively, and results are not sensitive to specification of price.     

Female Part‐Time Managers: Careers,Mentors and Role Models

This paper explores the careers of 27 women employed as part‐time managers in a range of UK public, private and not‐for‐profit sector organizations. Drawing upon semi‐structured interviews, the article briefly summarizes the career trajectories of these women, prior to and after a transition to part‐time working, before exploring whether and how career progression is linked to the support of role models and mentors. The part‐time managers in this sample held varied careers while working full‐time, but careers often stalled following a transition to part‐time work. Given research has identified role models and mentors as having a positive impact upon career progression, this paper explores the existence of role models and mentors within the sample of female part‐time managers. While the majority of interviewees identified role models, just over half identified these as negative role models who did little to champion part‐time working. Drawing upon Gibson's ‘positive/negative’ role model dimensions, we argue the likelihood of identifying positive and negative role models alters when an analysis takes account of gender and working hours. Few interviewees identified mentors: just four women spoke of being mentored currently, though ten others identified being mentored in the past. We argue this lack of mentors and the identification of negative role models, the majority of whom were women, exacerbates the already precarious position of these female part‐time managers. The paper concludes by commenting on the lack of support for female part‐time managers, and the paucity of influential people working part‐time in organizations, despite the rapid growth of part‐time work in the UK over the past four decades.     

From Collective Memory to Collective Imagination: Time,Place, and Urban Redevelopment

This article is about a place that does not exist, yet. It is about residents' perceptions of redevelopment plans involving the reconstruction of a defunct neighborhood firehouse. Interviews revealed the residents' “collective imagination” as they actively envisioned potential future outcomes for a firehouse‐turned–community center. When asked about the needs of the community, interviewees discussed the current conditions of their neighborhood (the present), its history (the past), and how they would like to see it change (the future). This corresponds well with George Herbert Mead's ideas about temporality. I argue that connecting the identity of a place to a sociological understanding of time (especially Mead's) is a necessary step for gaining a better understanding of the subjective side of urbanization and ultimately creating a better vernacular knowledge base for urban redevelopment plans.     

Working Part‐Time for the State: Gender,Class and the Public Sector Pay Gap

This article explores the role and nature of disadvantages associated with part‐time working in perpetuating the gender pay gap in the public sector. It does so by means of a detailed case study of local government workers in the UK, with particular reference to the more than one and a half million local government service workers covered by National Joint Council bargaining arrangements. The article draws from original pay data analysis and national survey work conducted by the author. It argues that little has changed since the findings reported 20 years ago by Beechey and Perkins with respect to the disadvantages experienced by part‐time workers and the ‘construction’ of employment in gendered ways. However, the role of class may have been understated in previous accounts: class fractions in gender‐segregated employment continue to hold deep significance and provide some potential for solidaristic approaches by trade unions alongside traditional ‘equality’ initiatives.