Families and Households

• Advantages of a single-parent family include increased independence and resilience in children, while disadvantages may include financial strain and limited parental support.
• Oakley (1974): argues that Young and Willmott (1973) claim of increasing symmetry is based upon inadequate methodology as their conclusions were only based on one interview question that exaggerates the amount of housework done by men
• Gershuny (1992,1999): found that husbands of working women continued to do less than half the housework. However, dual burden remained for women - men made more of an effort to do the housework when their wives were in paid work
• Gershuny (2000): over time there had been a slow drift towards men taking on more domestic responsibilities
• Oakley (1974): middle class households were more egalitarian. However, in both classes' few men had high levels of participation
• Young and Willmott (1973): found that differences between men's and women's work in time were not that great
• Lyonette and Crompton (2008 BSA survey): women tend to do more housework due to:

  1. men spend more time in employment with greater payment
  2. Normative Gender Construction: labour division is not rational rather shaped by dominant ideas surrounding gender roles
• Millenium Cohort Study: found when children are ill 69.6% of mothers did most of the childcare compared to 1.1% of cases where the partner took main care of the child. In 28.6% of cases, responsibility was shared
• Dunne (1999): when researching 37 lesbian households, they were more egalitarian. 81% of households neither partner did more than 60% of the housework. Those who did was because they worked longer hours.
• Hardille, Green and Owen (1997): found that males dominated decision making in the majority of households but in a significant minority - this was not the case
• Edgell (1980): found that women dominated domestic spending and children's clothes whilst men dominated areas considered more important like moving houses and overall finances
• Pahl (1989,1993): over a quarter of couples had a fairly equal system of money management. Most were dominated by men.
• Ferri and Smith (1996): through data from the National Child Development Survey -

  1. unusual for men to take primary responsibility for childcare even in dual earning families
  2. employment of women has had little impact upon male contribution to childcare/housework
• British Social Attitudes Survey (1992): found more childcare sharing than housework but there's some movement towards a more egalitarian division of labour
• Duncombe and Marsden (1995): identified emotion work undertaken by women. Most men don't acknowledge emotion work so women can take on a triple shift
• Vogler and Pahl (1994): confirms Pahl (1989,1993). They found an increase in the proportion of relationships with egalitarian financial arrangements. 23% of men had final say whilst 7% of women had final say
• Dunne (1999): concluded middle class women avoid consequences of men's lack of employment by employing other women to do the domestic tasks
• Oakley (1974) and Edgell (1980): found little sharing of household tasks
• Man-Yee-Kan: income, employment and age affects the amount of housework women do. Every £10000 in women's annual income reduces weekly household time by 2 hrs
• Braun Et al: men think they are more involved in childcare than they actually are, although fathers are doing more than their previous generation
• ramos 2003: when women is breadwinner the man does equal domestic labour to her
• arber and ginn 1995 : middle class women able to buy more products to lessen domestic labour
• smart 2007: division of labour in same sex relationships open to negotiation
• crompton 1997: no immediate equal domestic labour if depends on economic equality of sexes
• Barret and Mcintosh 1991: men gain more from womens domestic labour than women gain from financial work. financial support from men comes with 'strings attached' and men make decisions financially
• Pahl and Vogler 1993: allowance and pooling
• finch 1983: womens lives centred around men careers
• Gershuny 2000: 70% of couples said they had equal say in decisions. High earning women had more equality
• Nyman 2003: money has no automatic meaning for a couple
• smart 2007: gay men and lesbians attached nothing to who controls money
• weeks et al: typically use pooling system
• womens aid federation 2014: dv accounts for 1/4 of violent crime
• crime survery England Wales 2013: 2 million dv victims
• Coleman et al 2017: women more likley to experience intimate dv
• coleman and osborne 2010: 2 women killed a week in dv
• dar 2013: dv hard to record as it is continuous
• Yearnshire 1997: women suffer 35 dv incidents before reporting them
• cheal 1991: police see dv as domestic
• ONS 2020: 7% of dv cases result in conviction
• millet 1970 and firestone 1970: all societies built on patriachy. Men dominate women using violence