SOCIOLOGY COUPLES

• Segregated roles


  Men are the breadwinners and play little part in home life
• Conjugal roles


  More symmetrical division of labour in the family
• Symmetrical nuclear family


  • More common in younger couples, more affluent, geographically isolated
• Reasons for rise of symmetrical nuclear family

  1. Changes in women's position

  2. Geographical mobility

  3. New technology

  4. Higher standards of living
• Feminists reject march of progress view


  Men and women remain unequal within the family and women still do most of the housework
• Inequality stems from the fact that the family and society are male dominated or patriarchal
• Oakley's study findings


  • 15% husbands had a high level of participation in housework
  • 25% husbands had high participation in childcare
• Husbands more likely to do more pleasurably aspects of childcare, effectively removing the rewards from their wives who did the more monotonous jobs
• Women going to work

  More equal division of labour
• Women who worked full-time did less domestic work than other women
• Trend towards women doing a smaller share of domestic work and men doing more, also showed an increase in the number of couples with an equal division of labour
• Has not led to greater equality in the division of domestic labour, no sign of the 'new man' who does an equal share of housework and childcare
• British Social Attitudes survey 2012: men on average did 8 hours housework a week, women did 13. Men spent 10 hours on care of family, women did 13 hours. Couples continue to divide household tasks along traditional gender lines
• Mothers usually take charge of child's security and well-being, only 1% fathers in a study took on the main responsibility for caring for their child when they're sick
• Emotional work and the triple shift

  Feminist view
• Achieving quality time is much more difficult as mothers find themselves juggling the demands of work, personal leisure time and the family. Women's leisure time is often punctuated by childcare vs mens who get 'blocks' of leisure time
• Explanations for unequal division of labour

  • Cultural/ideological: division of labour shaped by patriarchal norms and values that shape gender roles
  • Material/economic: women generally earn less so it is economically rational for them to do more housework
• Every 10,000 a year more a woman makes, 2 hours less domestic work a week
• Feminists argue the extent of women in paid work leading to more equality is limited - women still do dual or triple burden, domestic tasks remain gendered
• Root of the problem is patriarchy - norms and values shape society's expectations and ensures that women earn less
• Allowance system


  Men give wives allowance to meet family's needs, man retaining any surplus income for himself
• Pooling


  Both partners have access to income and joint responsibility for bank account
• Decision making in households


  • Very important decisions: finance, job changes, moving house - taken by the husband alone or jointly with husband having last say
  • Important decisions: children's education, holidays - taken jointly
  • Less important decisions: home décor, clothes or food purchases - made by the wife
• Feminists argue inequalities in decision-making are due to patriarchal society, men being decision-makers in deeply ingrained in both men and women and is instilled through gender role socialisation
• Pooling does not mean equality, need to know who controls the pooled money and whether each partner contributed equally
• Keeping money separately does not mean inequality, cohabiting couples less likely to pool money but are more likely than married couples to share domestic tasks equally
• Some gay men and lesbians attached no importance to who controlled money and were perfectly happy to leave this to their partners, greater freedom for same sex couples to do what suits them as they don't enter the relationship with the same 'historical, gendered, heterosexual baggage of cultural meanings around money'