You will submit a 3-page book review of Deutsch and Gaunt’s Creating Equality at HomeLinks to an external site.. This review provides opportunity to critically assess the authors’ research and assess its implications for public policy.
Your book review should include the following elements:
1. Bibliographic information about the book and 2 sentences max on about the authors (e.g. they are professor somewhere and have written on what topics). Use APA or other full citation format for the book and do a google search of the author to find their current position and look at a curriculum vitae (CV)/ resume for information about their other research and scholarship). 1 point
2. Brief overview of the methods and types of data drawn on in the book. 1 point
3. A summary of the book’s contents in which you highlight at least three of the main theoretical or conceptual points the authors are making (e.g. not three stories, but the implications of those stories for broader patterns or ideas about equality at home). 3 points
4. Your assessment and appraisal of the book’s merits and shortcomings — how it compares with other research you’ve read on similar subjects, whether its conclusions flow from the analysis, and whether there is anything new or different in them.
setting the stage
1
Introduction
Francine M. Deutsch and Ruth A. Gaunt
Gender is changing. Men’s and women’s lives are converging in many
ways. Globally, there has been a dramatic increase in women’s legal rights
since the mid-20th century when the Convention on the Elimination of All
Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) was adopted by the
United Nations. Following suit, legislation throughout the world now
reflects the increasing consensus that women should have the same political and social rights as men, and should be free of harmful practices such
as domestic violence, genital cutting, and early marriage. Girls now are as
likely as boys to go to primary school in 117 out of 187 countries, and
overall, around the world today, young women are even more likely than
young men to attend universities. Fertility rates have fallen dramatically,
from 5 births per woman in 1960 to 2.5 in 2008, which means a decrease
in maternal death and more time for women to improve their economic
standing (World Bank, 2012). During the same period, women entered
the labor force in increasing numbers all over the world. In the overwhelming majority of countries, women’s labor force participation rate
increased between 1980 and 2016, although men’s participation rate is
still higher than women’s in every country (Ortiz-Ospina & Tzvetkova,
2017).
While women’s lives have changed dramatically in the public sphere,
numerous studies around the globe document the persistence of gender
inequality at home. After spending a day at the workplace, women are
often burdened by a second shift at home, a situation that Arlie Hochschild (1989) has dubbed “the stalled revolution.” True, in many countries
today, it is no longer a shock to see men diapering a baby or washing the
dishes. Over the past few decades, men have been increasing their
1
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Creating Equality at Home
contributions to domestic labor and women have been reducing theirs,
easing the disproportionate burden on women. Interestingly, at least in
Europe, some of the more conservative countries (e.g., Italy, Spain) have
shown the biggest leaps, albeit they are still behind the most egalitarian
countries (e.g., Sweden, Finland) (Altintas & Sullivan, 2017).
Despite these accounts of the decreasing gender gap, women still do
more childcare and housework than men in every country studied in the
world (Adams & Trost, 2005; Camilleri-Cassar, 2017; Galey, 2007;
Habib, Nuwayhid, & Yeretzian, 2006; Knudsen & Wærness, 2008; Moon
& Shin, 2018; Ortiz-Ospina & Tzvetkova, 2017; Simister, 2013; Simulja,
Wulandari, & Wulansari, 2014; Teerawichitchainan, Knodel, Vu, & Vu,
2010; Torosyan, Gerber, & Gonalons-Pons, 2016; Treas & Tai, 2016;
United Nations Development Program in Montenegro, 2012).1 Even in
tiny Vanatinai, an island in the South Pacific touted as the most egalitarian
place on earth, men hunt the wild boar, which confers status, while women
sweep up pigshit (Wilford, 1994). Moreover, there is some evidence that in
the most egalitarian countries the gap between men and women is no
longer decreasing (Altintas & Sullivan, 2017).
Paradoxically, even in the most unlikely contexts couples can and do
choose equality. Creating Equality at Home tells the real-life stories of
heterosexual couples in 22 countries who are bucking the tide and equally
sharing the work of the home. The 22 countries represent 5 continents,
different levels of development, and are predominantly Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, or Jewish. Among the countries included are the UN’s topranked gender egalitarian country, as well as a country that ranks 117 out
of 189 countries (United Nations Development Programme, 2018). Despite the vast cultural diversity, the book tells a story of similarity rather
than difference. In all cases, from Brazil to Bhutan, from Iceland to
Indonesia, men and women are undoing gender on a daily basis, having
1
The countries referenced in these citations include: Albania, Algeria, Argentina, Australia,
Austria, Bangladesh, Belgium, Benin, Bhutan, Brazil, Bulgaria, Cambodia, Cameroon,
Canada, Chad, Chile, China, Colombia, Croatia, Cuba, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Ecuador, Egypt, Estonia, Finland, France, Georgia, Germany, Ghana, Guatemala,
Honduras, Hungary, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Indonesia, Israel, Italy, Japan,
Kazakhstan, Kenya, Latvia, Lebanon, Lithuania, Macedonia, Madagascar, Mali, Malta,
Mexico, Mongolia, Montenegro, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, Nicaragua,
Norway, Pakistan, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia,
Slovenia, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Tanzania, Thailand,
Turkey, Uganda, United Kingdom, and the United States. For a number of these countries
there are multiple studies confirming the inequality. To save space, they are not cited here
because they merely confirm the findings already cited.
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Introduction
3
to contend with the social costs of doing so, but also reaping its rewards.
Creating Equality at Home is a story of gender resisters. These are couples
who refuse to simply enact the norms that surround them. Defying
constraints, finding structural loopholes, or taking advantage of
equality-friendly policies, through their own agency these couples find
ways to forge revolutionary ways of living.
Why It Matters
For both women and men, this new kind of family can be liberating.
Women increase their power by having an equal chance to succeed in the
paid work force. Gender inequality is a self-perpetuating system that is
driven by the gendered division of labor. When women specialize in domestic work, while men focus on breadwinning/career, husbands’ jobs give
them more economic power, which translates into more time in the labor
force and less contribution to the work at home. As women take on more
domestic labor, they invest less in career, which results in lower wages and
less of the nonmaterial rewards of achievement and public recognition as
well as less power in and outside the family (Chafetz, 1988; Noonan, 2001).
These dynamics are buttressed by ideologies perpetuated by men that tout
women’s superior nurturing abilities, and by a “rhetoric of choice,” which
in a world of pressure and constraint pushing them toward gendered roles,
women claim to be freely choosing those roles (Stone, 2007).
It is not simply power that is at issue, though. By sharing the work of
the home, both men and women access the opportunity to develop key
capacities within themselves, opportunities that Nussbaum (2011) has
argued are central to the quality of human life. Theories that focus on
power emphasize that women are victims of constraining gendered roles,
but men’s capabilities are stunted as well by the constraints of masculinity
(Elliott, 2016). By sharing childcare men are able to develop as nurturers
and experience the kind of closeness with their children that is typically
reserved for mothers. Moreover, the shared breadwinning that is enabled
by shared domestic labor could potentially give men (at least in more
economically privileged families) more freedom to pursue the work of
their choice, even if it is not well compensated financially.
The Research Literature
Creating Equality addresses questions raised in the research literature. Is
it necessary for women to have a high income or at least high relative to
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Creating Equality at Home
their husbands to achieve equal sharing? How do husbands and wives
decide on how to allot time to paid and family work? What drives the
equal sharers’ deployment of free time to childcare and housework? To
what extent does explicit nontraditional gender ideology underwrite
equality? Are other beliefs, such as the rejection of essentialism, key to
creating equality? How are a country’s policies addressed at the couple
level? In egalitarian countries, do couples explicitly acknowledge the ways
in which structural factors help them? How do couples in less gender
equality-friendly countries get around the lack of supportive policies and
cultures?
Creating Equality shows how couples undo gender. At the core, the
undoing gender perspective assumes human agency. The structural and
ideological context in which families live can push them toward or away
from equality, but where couples end up depends on how they interpret
and respond to those contexts. Gendered norms are strong forces that
shape everyday life. We don’t dispute that men and women are accountable to those norms and often suffer disapproval or worse if they don’t
live up to them. However, norms can be thwarted. How equal sharers
resist and undo gender to create equality unfolds in Creating Equality at
Home.
The Case Studies
Twenty-three chapters include 25 case studies of equally sharing
couples from 22 different countries. (Two chapters represent the United
States, and two chapters include two contrasting cases.) Each chapter
includes: 1) the everyday life of the couple, the “who does what” of
equality; 2) the history of how equality was developed in their family;
3) the ways in which paid work and family are integrated; and 4) an
analysis of the factors that facilitate and impede the couple’s efforts to
share equally.
A typical day in the life of each couple is described: the nuts and bolts
of who gets breakfast together for the kids, takes them to school, puts
them to bed, wakes up with a crying child at night, who cleans up, who
makes sure everyone has clean laundry. Parenting entails more than
chores, however, so the relationships between parents and children are
also described: who comforts, who plays. In these descriptions, equality
emerges in different ways that vary in the extent to which couples undo
gender. The history examines whether equality was an agreed-upon
principle adopted from the outset. Did negotiations over time promote a
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Introduction
5
more egalitarian life or did circumstances conspire to push a given
couple in an egalitarian direction? Careers are then considered. In what
ways do couples subvert the typical pattern that women cut back while
men forge ahead? How are schedules managed to allow for sharing? The
analysis then takes a careful look at the forces that operate for each
couple. What allows them to undo powerful gendered norms? What is
the role of families of origin, their social worlds, their jobs/careers, their
country’s family policies, and their beliefs about gender? Finally, to help
the reader put the couple in context, in addition to the case description
and analysis, each country chapter offers a description of the demographics, the typical division of household labor, and the family policy
in that country.
Organization of the Chapters
After the introduction, a chapter will review extant theories and research
on domestic labor and will describe how our global study was conducted. The 23 case study chapters that follow will be presented in five
groups. Each group highlights a different aspect of equal sharing: how
couples consciously create equality; resist social norms; prioritize family;
draw on lessons from families of origin; and use government policies.
Although all of the chapters have information that bears on each of
these aspects, this structure emphasizes that creating equality and the
factors that facilitate it operate similarly in the diverse cultures represented in our research. We start with Israel, Honduras, Montenegro,
Switzerland, and Sweden to illustrate couples who consciously translate
egalitarian principles into equally sharing practice. The second group
(Indonesia, Croatia, Bhutan, Hungary, and USA: California) provide
examples of couples who thwart gendered social norms, despite criticism. The third group (USA: New England, Brazil, Australia, and Singapore) illustrates the prioritization of family. In the fourth group (Austria,
Turkey, Czech Republic, People’s Republic of China, and Slovenia),
family of origin provides models and anti-models for equal sharing.
The fifth group comprises Iceland, Germany, the United Kingdom, and
Portugal, where couples took advantage of government leave policies
that promoted paternal care. Finally, we bring the insights across countries together with two concluding chapters: a chapter describing the
key aspects of undoing gender, the “how” of equality; and a chapter
analyzing the factors that facilitate the undoing of gender, the “why” of
equality.
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Creating Equality at Home
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and Childcare under Different Welfare Policy Regimes. Social Politics, 24(1),
81–108.
Camilleri-Cassar, F. (2017). About Time: Gender Equality in Malta’s WorkingTime Regime. Social Policy and Society, 16(4), 561–575.
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Introduction
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2
Past and Current Research
Francine M. Deutsch and Ruth A. Gaunt
Theories of Domestic Labor
A vast literature has tried to explain why women do the majority of
domestic labor. Five theoretical approaches have dominated. These
include relative resources, time availability, gender ideology, national
context, and “doing gender.” Each will be described and reviewed in
turn. In contrast to all of this work, Creating Equality at Home will focus
on how couples create equality by undoing gender in their everyday
interactions.
Relative Resources
The relative resources approach argues that couples divide household
labor according to the resources they contribute. Although hypothetically
resources could be money, status, or education, most empirical work on
relative resources focuses on the relative incomes of husbands and wives.
The greater the relative income of a spouse, the less household labor s/he
will do. Two conflicting theoretical positions underlie this prediction. The
first, argued by Becker (1991), is that it is simply good economic sense for
the well-being of the family for the person with the greatest potential for
earning to specialize in market work, while the other spouse specializes in
domestic labor. He assumes that women have a comparative advantage in
child-rearing, whereas men, because of their greater investment in market
work, have an advantage in that domain. Becker has been widely criticized by feminist scholars because of his assumption that the family
operates as a cooperative unit in which everyone benefits from the
8
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Past and Current Research
9
specialization entailed in the unequal division of domestic labor (England
& Folbre, 2005; Ferber, 2008). In contrast, the second approach, which is
sometimes called the bargaining approach, assumes that no one wants to
do housework and childcare, so the person with the greater income has
more clout to get out of it. Women end up doing more domestic labor
simply because they tend to make less money than men.
Several multi-country studies have provided support for the relative
resources theory (Aassve, Fuochi, & Mencarini, 2014; Davis & Greenstein, 2004; Fahlén, 2016; Geist, 2005; Knudsen & Wærness, 2008). In
Fahlén’s 10-country European study (2016), however, the increasing
share of husbands’ domestic labor was mostly due to their wives’ spending less time on housework, rather than on their doing more. In contrast,
a Swedish study showed that women with higher relative incomes did
have a relatively more equal division of housework, but only because their
husbands increased their contributions. In that study, the women’s housework hours were unaffected (Evertsson & Nermo, 2007). Finally, in
Davis and Greenstein’s study (2004), only men’s reports showed the
equalizing effects of women’s greater relative resources.
Several researchers have critiqued the relative resources approach by
showing that once women’s incomes exceed their husband’s, rather than
diminishing their share of labor, their share increases (Brines, 1994;
Greenstein, 2000; Bittman, England, Sayer, Folbre, & Mateson, 2003).
They interpreted this curvilinear relationship as illustrating gender deviance neutralization. When women out-earn their husbands it violates
gender norms; to compensate and reassert the gender order, either women
increase their household labor, men decrease theirs, or both. However,
these findings have either failed to replicate (Evertsson & Nermo, 2007;
Kan, 2008; Sullivan & Gershuny, 2016), have been dismissed as trivial
(England, 2011), or have been debunked as statistical artifacts (Gupta,
2007; Sullivan, 2011). Moreover, presumably, unemployment poses the
strongest threat to masculine identity, yet several studies show that men
do more domestic labor when unemployed (Fahlén, 2016; Gough &
Killewald, 2011; Kamo, 1988). Nonetheless, recent studies in more traditional cultures, such as Australia, Taiwan, Romania, and India, have
shown evidence consistent with gender deviance neutralization (Aassve
et al., 2014; Baxter & Hewitt, 2013; Luke, Xu, & Thampi, 2014).
Gupta (2007) has proposed and provided evidence that women’s
absolute, rather than their relative incomes, reduce their hours of housework, thereby reducing their share. Even so, his “autonomy hypothesis,”
implying that with more income women are freer to do what they want
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Creating Equality at Home
without having to bargain over domestic labor with their husbands, is
consistent with the notion that money talks. He does not provide evidence
of the mechanism by which greater income leads to less housework for
women, but speculates that they could be using the income to outsource
domestic work, or they might feel freer to loosen up on household
standards.
A rigorous cross-sectional and longitudinal study in Britain took a
broader approach to resources, which included human capital factors
(Sullivan & Gershuny, 2016). Based on a composite measure of education, job experience, and status, it showed the importance of women’s
absolute level of human capital for both women’s and men’s hours in
housework. Although husbands’ and wives’ relative human capital did
reveal the predicted effects, women’s absolute level had a much bigger
impact on their housework hours. The more resources women had, the
less time they spent on cleaning, cooking, and laundry. For men, although
relative resources was technically the stronger predictor, men’s incomes
had little impact. Overall, both spouses seemed to adjust their housework
contributions based on the resources available to wives (Sullivan &
Gershuny, 2016).
However, there are limits to the absolute income effect in the USA. In
both cross-sectional and longitudinal data of couples who were both
employed full-time, as low-income women’s earnings increased, their
housework hours decreased a lot, but at the higher end of the income
spectrum, further increases in income had little effect. The resulting nonlinear relationship did not mean that women were compensating by doing
more housework. They did not do more than other women, but still did a
lot of housework, despite their financial contributions to the family (Killewald & Gough, 2010). Some work cannot be outsourced.
Although the relative resources theory was formulated to predict both
housework and childcare, most of the research refers only to housework.
When childcare is included, relative income is less associated with childcare than with housework (Deutsch, Lussier, & Servis, 1993; Kan &
Gershuny, 2010; Mannino & Deutsch, 2007). Therefore, this theoretical
approach may tell us something about how husbands and wives divide
housework, but it doesn’t tell us much about childcare nor how couples
can achieve equality. The inequality in housework persists no matter how
high women’s incomes or no matter what their income is compared to
their husband’s (Evertsson & Nermo, 2007; Greenstein, 2000; Killewald
& Gough, 2010). In Creating Equality at Home we will examine the role
that income plays among equal sharers. Is equal income a necessary
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Past and Current Research
11
(although clearly not a sufficient) condition for achieving equality? Do
women in equally sharing couples tend to have exceptionally high
incomes?
Time Availability
The time availability hypothesis argues that domestic labor will be
divided based on who is available to provide it. Time is assumed to be
available when the individual is not working for pay. This approach is
sometimes called the demand/response model because the time devoted to
domestic labor is both a function of what is needed and a spouse’s
capability of responding. The major predictions are that spouses’ time
in domestic labor will be negatively related to their own employment
hours and positively related to their spouses’ hours (Shelton & John,
1996).
The time availability perspective has received robust support. With
respect to housework, across countries as diverse as Austria, Norway,
France, and Rumania, when women are employed full-time they do a
smaller share, whereas full-time employment for husbands means a
greater share for wives (Aassve et al., 2014). Baxter and Hewitt (2013)
documented that every hour of women’s paid work in Australia translated to 7 fewer minutes devoted to housework. Similarly, in Sweden
(Evertsson, 2014), Korea, Japan, and Taiwan (Kim, 2013), as wives’
employment hours increased, their housework hours decreased, whereas
as their partners’ employment hours increased, their housework hours
increased. In urban China, the more hours wives worked for pay, the
more time their husbands spent on housework on weekdays (Zhang,
2017). Several multi-country studies also showed that overall, women’s
time in the labor force reduced the time they spent on housework (Geist,
2005; Knudson & Wærness, 2008; Treas & Tai, 2016).
Turning to childcare, although some evidence supports time availability, the picture is more mixed. In her multi-country study, Hook (2006)
found that men with children do more housework and childcare as their
wives’ paid work hours increase. Similar associations between mothers’
paid work hours and fathers’ share of childcare were found in the UK
(Gaunt & Scott, 2014), Sweden (Evertsson, 2014), and Israel (Gaunt,
2005, 2018). Studies have also shown that fathers’ paid work hours
reduced their time with children (e.g. Gaunt & Scott, 2014; Maume,
2011) or their share of specific childcare tasks such as diapering (e.g.
DeMaris, Mahoney, & Pargament, 2011; Gaunt, 2005; Gaunt & Scott,
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Creating Equality at Home
2014). A time-use study in Canada showed that for both mothers and
fathers, paid work hours reduced time with children, whereas spouses’
paid work hours increased time (Buchanan, 2016). Nonetheless, in general, the effects are small. For example, dads who work 50+ hours per
week spend only 1 hour less per week on childcare than those with more
standard work hours.
The implication of the time availability hypothesis is that if only
women and men spent equal time on paid labor, equality at home would
be achieved. We know, however, that although women’s time in paid
labor may reduce their time in domestic labor, and reduce their share,
wives still do more than husbands when they spend equal hours in the
labor force (Bittman et al., 2003). The domestic labor gap remains even
when women’s time in paid work exceeds their husbands’ (Fahlén, 2016;
Shelton, 2000). Moreover, the time availability hypothesis begs the question of how time was allocated to begin with. Why do women and men
spend their time differently?
By considering what goes on inside the family, Creating Equality at
Home aims to illuminate decisions about the allocation of time, including
how much time each spouse spends in the workforce. Moreover, we
investigate how time is spent outside of paid work and whether equality
in the division of domestic labor also means equal time for leisure pursuits
for men and women.
Gender Ideology
The gender ideology hypothesis argues that the division of household
labor and childcare reflects husbands’ and wives’ beliefs about appropriate roles for men and women. Couples with traditional beliefs are
expected to have a less equal division of labor than those with nontraditional beliefs (Shelton & John, 1996). Gender ideology is measured via
research participants’ agreement with statements such as, “A man’s job is
to earn money; a woman’s job is to look after the home and family” (i.e.,
traditional). “When husband and wife both work full-time, they should
share housework and childcare equally” (i.e., nontraditional). Strong
support for the importance of gender ideology has been obtained in the
domestic labor literature. However, the relative impact of men’s and
women’s ideologies differs across studies, and the effects differ for housework and childcare.
In a classic study based on 1988 US data, Greenstein (1996) found that
men did the highest percentage of household labor when both they and
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their wives shared a nontraditional gender ideology. Egalitarian men
married to traditional women did not do a greater share of domestic
labor than their more traditional counterparts. Kamo (1988) found that
both men’s and women’s nontraditional ideology reduced the gender gap
in housework, but men’s ideology had the bigger impact. When their
ideologies conflicted, the ideology of the person with the greater power
in the relationship prevailed. Gender ideology has been shown to be
strongly associated with sharing in both western and eastern Europe
(Aassve et al., 2014). Likewise, Fuwa’s (2004) 22-country study, which
included cultures as diverse as Bulgarian, Japanese, New Zealander,
Norwegian, and American, showed a reduction in the gender gap in
housework associated with nontraditional gender ideologies of both
men and women. As relative shares of tasks become more equal, however,
it is not always clear whether the reduction in the gap is due to women’s
doing less household labor or men’s doing more. In one study of Israeli
and German women, their hours of housework were reduced when they
endorsed nontraditional gender ideology (Lewin-Epstein, Stier, & Braun,
2006). Presumably, their share would then be reduced regardless of
whether or not their husbands changed their behavior. Finally, although
Kan (2008) confirmed gender ideology effects on the housework gap, that
did not override the effects of relative resources in her British sample.
Gender ideology may matter even more for childcare than for housework (e.g., Deutsch et al., 1993). Infant care, in particular, may be
influenced by what mothers and fathers think is appropriate for men.
In two Israeli studies, both mothers’ and fathers’ gender ideologies
predicted their share of specific childcare tasks, as well as the mothers’
time with infants, but not the fathers’ time (Gaunt, 2006, 2018). McGill
(2014) found that American fathers who worked 50 or more hours per
week but endorsed the “new fatherhood,” which extols the equal
importance of mothers and fathers, took as much responsibility for
children and did as much caregiving and playing as fathers who worked
more standard hours. In Korea, however, nontraditional gender ideology
only predicted paternal involvement for men who do not work long
hours for pay. Dads who worked more than 60 hours per week did little
childcare regardless of their gender attitudes (Moon & Shin, 2018).
Finally, not surprisingly, mothers’ gender attitudes have been particularly important in shaping their husband’s involvement in childcare
because gatekeeping by mothers (i.e., acting to limit paternal involvement with children) is strongly associated with traditional gender
ideology (Kulik & Tsoref, 2010).
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Gender ideology certainly matters. Nonetheless, there is ample evidence that a nontraditional ideology does not in and of itself give rise to
gender equality in household labor. Couples who espouse equality may
be more equal than other couples on average, but women in those
families are still doing more of the work at home. Other attitudes and
circumstances may take precedence over the belief that men and women
should have equal rights and responsibilities. For example, essentialism,
the belief that women are inherently more suited to caregiving, may butt
up against the notion that fathers and mothers should share care (Gaunt,
2006).
Creating Equality at Home examines the ideologies expressed by the
equally sharing couples. To what extent do explicitly feminist ideas
underlie their division of labor? Beyond a general belief in nontraditional
roles for men and women, how important is the rejection of essentialist
notions to the establishment of equality in families? What helps couples
put their egalitarian ideas into practice?
National Context
The approaches we have discussed thus far operate at the individual or
couple level. The degree of inequality between husband and wife stems
from their characteristics as a couple (relative income) or as individuals
within a couple (absolute incomes, time in paid work, gender ideology).
Researchers have turned to national context to examine cultural beliefs
and practices and government policies that shape the ways couples share
housework and childcare. In addition, they examine how characteristics
of countries (e.g., the overall level of gender equality) influence the
strength of women’s resources, their time in the work force, and spouses’
gender ideologies in equalizing the gender gap in domestic labor.
The more egalitarian gender ideology held on average in a country, the
more equally couples in that country share domestic tasks, regardless of
their personal circumstances or beliefs (Fahlén, 2016). Likewise, the
higher the overall gender equality of a nation, the more equally tasks
are divided between husbands and wives (Fuwa, 2004; Knudsen &
Wærness, 2008). In more gender-equal countries women’s hours of
household work are reduced (Knudsen & Wærness, 2008; van der Lippe,
2010) and couples’ gender ideologies have stronger effects (Fuwa, 2004).
Diefenach (2002) divided countries into egalitarian, traditional, and transitional (i.e., in between) and found that the impact of relative resources
was strongest in the transitional group. However, Knudsen and Wærness
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(2008) found that more gender-equal countries showed the strongest
equalizing effect of relative resources.
Countries differ with respect to policies that may influence the division
of labor in couples. One approach to understanding these effects has been
to categorize and compare countries that represent different welfare
regimes, such as social-democratic (i.e., the Nordic countries), liberal
(e.g., USA, UK, Australia), and conservative (e.g., Italy, Germany). Geist
(2005) adopted this approach to categorize 10 developed countries and
showed that social-democratic countries had the most egalitarian divisions of housework and the conservative countries the least, controlling
for the relative incomes, gender ideologies, and paid work hours in
couples. Although overall, relative income, gender ideology, and time
availability were associated with the division of labor, in conservative
regimes the gender ideologies of husbands and wives didn’t matter, but
women’s paid work hours had a stronger equalizing effect than in the
other regimes. Altintas and Sullivan (2017) used a similar classification to
examine changes over time and found that Nordic countries have changed
the most over a 50-year period, corporatist countries (e.g., France,
Slovenia) the least, southern countries (e.g., Italy, Spain) are moving to
catch up, and liberal countries are polarizing, increasing the differences in
the contributions among men.
Hook and Wolfe (2012) adopted this approach to examine men’s
involvement in parenting, including physical care, one-to-one interactions
with children, and time alone with them. They identified four countries to
represent the three welfare regimes: Norway (social-democratic); USA
and UK (liberal); Germany (conservative). As predicted, Norwegian
fathers did the most physical care of children; German fathers did the
least. American and British fathers were the most responsive to women’s
paid work hours. British fathers who had days off during the week were
especially likely to spend time interacting with children and time alone
with them.
Several problems plague the regime approach. First, researchers have
not been consistent in identifying countries that fit particular categories.
Although the Nordic countries are consistently named as the representatives of the social-democratic group, and the USA and UK consistently
represent the liberal regimes, there is more discrepancy in countries
named as conservative, which makes it difficult to have confidence in
the findings. Geist (2005), for example, included Italy, Japan, and Austria
as representatives of conservative countries. Her finding that women’s
paid work hours had a stronger effect in equalizing household tasks in
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Creating Equality at Home
conservative countries than in the other regimes was not replicated by van
der Lippe (2010), but she used Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands as
examples of conservative countries.
In addition, as Cooke (2010) points out, specific policies matter.
Countries within the same regimes often have very different policies.
For example, Australia and the USA are both classified as liberal, but
although Australia has strong anti-discrimination policies vis-à-vis the
workforce, other policies encourage families to adopt a male breadwinner/female part-timer model. The USA, in contrast, has little in the way of
family policy and less access to part-time work than Australia. Moreover,
policies within countries can have contradictory effects. Long parental
leaves and access to part-time work, for example, can discourage sharing
by prompting women to stay out of the workforce or reduce their time in
it, whereas public childcare as well as strong anti-discrimination policies
may encourage women to be employed full-time and thereby increase
sharing at home (Cooke, 2010; Geist & Cohen, 2011; Hook, 2006). In
Sweden, the push for longer earmarked leaves for fathers, which would
promote equality, is at odds with Swedish initiative to promote a longer
period of breastfeeding (Ellingsæter, 2010).
Studies that include multiple countries without classifying them
according to regime are useful for examining the impact of specific
policies. For example, Fuwa and Cohen (2007) showed that the absence
of discriminatory policies, such as forbidding women to work night shifts,
carry heavy loads, or work underground, was related to a more equal
division of household labor. Moreover, relative resources had a bigger
impact on equalizing housework in countries that did not have gender
discriminatory labor practices (Fuwa & Cohen, 2007). However, affirmative action policies and the availability of public childcare did not affect
the division of household labor. Hook (2006) also reported that men’s
time in housework and childcare were lessened by a country’s long
parental leaves, but were increased when the country provided exclusive
paternal leave.
Pfau-Effinger (2010) argues that policies, however, do not tell the
whole story because the interactions between culture and policy have to
be taken into account. For example, although Norway and Denmark
have high availability of public childcare, mothers often don’t take advantage of it to pursue full-time employment. In Nordic countries the disapproval of hiring household help may discourage women from full-time
employment, and thus shape the division of labor between husband
and wife.
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Hook (2010) drew on time-use research on married parents in 19 European countries to study how work cultures as well as leave and public
childcare policies shaped the time husbands and wives spent cooking,
arguing that cooking was particularly important because it was relatively
inflexible routine work. Work culture seems more important than actual
hours in predicting a man’s cooking time. In high work-hour cultures men
worked an average of 50 hours per week as compared to 37 hours per
week in low work-hour cultures. Hook discovered that a man who
worked a 10-hour day in a short work-hours culture spent as much time
cooking as a man who worked a 5-hour day in a long work-hours culture.
Moreover, echoing previous studies, she found that long parental leaves
were associated with greater time cooking for women and less for men,
but the availability of parental leave for men and public childcare only
decreased women’s cooking time.
In an earlier study, Hook (2006) showed that the national level of
women’s employment influenced men’s unpaid work. The higher the
percentage of married women who were employed, the more unpaid
labor men did, regardless of the paid work configuration in their own
family.
No matter how friendly policies or cultural norms are to gender
equality, it is the ongoing interactions within couples that determine
how and when those policies and norms will be applied. One thing is
indisputable across all multi-country studies of gender attitudes, regime
differences, policy effects, and work cultures: gender trumps everything.
Women in all countries studied do more housework and childcare than
men, regardless of a country’s egalitarian philosophy, family-friendly
policies, or social-democratic organization.
Gender Construction
The “doing gender” approach was developed to explain why inequality in
domestic work persists in the face of dramatic increases in women’s
employment, their incomes, and changes in gender attitudes. Berk
(1985) argued that housework produces more than a clean house; it
produces gender. Women and men are differentiated by their differing
contributions to the household. West and Zimmerman (1987) built on
this idea in their classic article, “Doing Gender.” They argued that gender
is created in social interactions for which men and women are always and
everywhere held accountable to gendered norms. People act knowing that
they will be judged for being suitably womanly women or manly men.
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The standards for appropriate masculinity and femininity vary from
culture to culture but exist everywhere (West & Zimmerman, 1987).
Although the husbands of tea pluckers in India would help with some
typically female chores, they would only rarely do clothes washing, which
was considered inherently feminine. The unusual men who washed their
own clothes hid it from other people (Luke et al., 2014). Anderson (2017)
showed that in the Ukraine the gendered treatment of money was used to
create the image that men were the breadwinners, even when their
incomes were meager. Women’s incomes were treated as merely supplemental. For example, men’s incomes were used to buy physical objects
whereas women’s were used for consumable products. Clearly, the gender
neutral assumptions of the relative resources hypothesis would not hold
in that context.
An interesting study conducted in Poland found that when men were
given false feedback that they had low testosterone levels, they were less
likely to endorse sharing of housework and childcare (KosakowskaBerezecka, Korzeniewska, & Kaczorowska, 2016). Presumably to shore
up their masculinity in the face of threat, they denigrated the feminine
realm of domestic work. In Poland, a man who is too involved with his
family will be looked down on and considered incompetent, whereas
father involvement is praised in Norway. Interestingly, Polish men who
migrate to Norway do more domestic labor than their counterparts back
in Poland, suggesting that gendered behavior is responsive to changing
norms (Kosakowska-Berezecka et al., 2016).
The centrality of gender is highlighted at a key moment in the life of a
couple: the birth of a first child. It is well established that the transition to
parenthood has a traditionalizing effect in the family (Fox, 2009; Grunow, Schulz, & Blossfeld, 2012; Starbuck & Lundy, 2016). From the
earliest days of parenting, women take on the mental work accompanying
the baby care. Some of that worrying is simply required for infant care,
such as remembering to get diapers. However, Walzer (1996) argues that
“thinking about the baby” is also part and parcel of living up to the
gendered expectations of being a good mother. Mothers worry.
Gendered expectations push women to feel responsible for the care of
children, men for breadwinning. After the birth of a child, women’s
allocation of time shifts much more toward the home and children than
do men’s (Kühhirt, 2012). Couples then make critical decisions, which are
gendered, about how to structure the balance of family and work life and
thus set up the conditions that shape the division of labor over time. Men
continue to prioritize paid work, whereas women prioritize care. The
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greater the number of children and the younger the children, the more
central are men’s work identity and the less central are women’s (Gaunt
& Scott, 2017). Women tend to scale back on their jobs/careers, turning
to part-time work, less demanding jobs, or more flexible jobs, or take time
out of the labor force (Becker & Moen, 1999; Lyonette & Crompton,
2015). Women are more likely to negotiate with their employers for
reduced hours or flex-time, and when men do ask for flex-time, they
sometimes hide that it is for family care (Young & Schieman, 2018). Even
within couples with two high-status careers, including two-physician
couples, it is women who adjust or reduce their careers (Hardill, 2004;
Hinze, 2000). As women’s careers fade, their work at home expands.
Paid work remains central to men after fatherhood. Gender ideology is
lacking as a theory for the division of domestic labor because it doesn’t
address the gendered identity issues that men face (Petts, Shafer, & Essig,
2018). Gaunt (2018) found, for example, that when paid work was
central to men’s identity, they did less housework and childcare.
Hegemonic masculinity norms are at odds with involved fatherhood.
Not only are achievement and earning essential components of hegemonic
masculinity, many of the characteristics of a nurturing parent clash with
masculine mandates to restrict emotionality, avoid anything feminine, be
tough, aggressive, and detached from relationships. Calls for the “new
fatherhood,” which demands nurturance and engagement with children,
are at direct odds with hegemonic masculinity. In fact, men who endorsed
masculinity norms were less involved with their children and more likely
to use harsh discipline, which was partially explained by their rejecting
the new fatherhood ideals (Petts et al., 2018). Even men who reject the
emotional constriction of hegemonic masculinity and happily embrace the
nurturing as part of their identity may still be as invested in their job/
career performance as any traditional man (Deutsch, 1999).
There is ample evidence that gender shapes both resources and time.
Even when support for time availability is obtained, for example,
women’s time is not deployed the same way as men’s. For example, both
men and women may do more housework when they are unemployed,
but the increase for women is greater than for men, at least in Canada, the
United Kingdom, France, and Germany (Gough & Killewald, 2011;
Sayer, 2010). Underlining the paramount role of gender, women and
men who work full-time and have equal salaries still show a gender gap
in domestic labor. Resources may confer power, but they don’t confer as
much power on women as on men (Davis & Greenstein, 2013). “Women
cannot easily buy their way to equality with men when it comes to
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Creating Equality at Home
household labor responsibilities” (Killewald & Gough, 2010, p. 101).
Gender accounts for more than any other factor in the distribution of
household labor.
The “doing gender” approach was a brilliant breakthrough which
countered prevailing static notions of gender as being either biological
or socialized in childhood. Instead, West and Zimmerman (1987) argued
that gender had to be constantly reproduced. However, the flaw in this
theory was their contention that both behaviors that conformed and those
that violated gendered norms are instances of “doing gender” because the
actors would be judged by gender standards in either case. By failing to
differentiate between behaviors that conform and those that resist, we
effectively render resistance invisible. Thus the “doing gender” theory
does not recognize the possibility of equality. Nonetheless, West and
Zimmerman’s focus on the interactional level of analysis can be brought
to bear on acts of resistance that undo gender (i.e., reduce the difference
between men and women) (Deutsch, 2007).
Undoing Gender
Instead of doing gender, the equal sharers we studied undo gender
(Deutsch, 2007)! Perhaps not always perfectly or completely, but their
struggles show that it is possible to live less gendered lives.1 Our focus on
the interactional level of analysis illuminates the couples’ acts of resistance
that undo gender. In Creating Equality, the undoing gender approach
means that we focus on couples’ negotiations, acts, conflicts, and decisions, which often defy the pressure to conform to gendered norms.
Previous studies on topics as diverse as housework, work on an oil rig,
breakdancing, leisure, and public versus private fathering, have already
shown the utility of this approach (Domínguez-Folgueras, JuradoGuerrero, Botía-Morillas, & Amigot-Leache, 2017; Ely & Meyerson,
2010; Langnes & Fasting, 2017; Shaw, 2001; Shows & Gerstel, 2009).
This undoing gender frame will undergird the analysis of the equally
sharing case studies by showing how couples’ everyday lives challenge
gender norms. We demonstrate how the ongoing acts and decisions that
1
When couples violate gendered behavioral norms, they challenge gender itself: the notion
that humans can be categorized into two mutually exclusive groups. Our work reinforces
recent arguments made by scholars of transgender identity that refute the gender binary
(Tate, Ben Hagai, & Crosby, 2019).
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comprise the interactions of husbands and wives with each other and their
children can add up to equality.
How We Did the Creating Equality Research
Recruitment of Scholars
Creating Equality at Home began with the recruitment of family scholars.
The first editor contacted feminist researchers who studied family issues in
countries around the globe, and invited them to participate in the project.
Each researcher would be responsible for his/her own expenses. There
was no restriction on discipline, and thus, the collaborators recruited
include social psychologists, sociologists, and anthropologists. They were
identified through searches in the literature on housework, gender, and
childcare, so in almost all cases had previously published in Englishlanguage journals. Researchers in 22 countries agreed to participate and
completed all parts of the project. In a number of cases, the scholars
originally contacted took on co-authors. In all, 36 social scientists were
involved in the research for the book.
The Protocol
The researchers responsible for each country were instructed to recruit an
equally sharing couple to interview. The criteria were that the heterosexual married or cohabiting couple were native language speakers, had at
least one child aged 10 or younger, that both husband and wife were
employed, and that neither were professors or university academics.
Same-sex couples were not included because they do not have an intractable history of inequality in domestic labor. Freed of the male/female
dynamics that underwrite the inequality between husbands and wives,
same-sex couples hold more egalitarian ideals and practice more egalitarian divisions of domestic labor than do heterosexual couples (Rostosky &
Riggle, 2017).
Once the researchers identified a potential couple, they were to administer a screening interview, usually by telephone, to husband and wife
separately, which assessed their overall view of how household chores
and childcare were divided, and then asked how 30 tasks were divided, on
a 5-point scale ranging from (1) almost always done by my spouse to (5)
almost always done by me, with (3) as the indicator of equality. The tasks
included routine housework, such as laundry, cooking, and cleaning, and
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Creating Equality at Home
a range of childcare tasks, such as putting children to bed, feeding,
playing/reading, getting up at night with them, comforting, and sick care.
To be considered equal, couples had to agree that it was, and the division
of tasks overall had to be consistent with their assessment. Researchers
consulted with the editors to verify that the division of labor was equal. In
a few cases, the equally sharing couple was chosen from other research
projects that had revealed their equal sharing (e.g., Germany), in which
case they did not complete the screening interview.
The second phase entailed a face-to-face interview with each member of
the couple. The interview included questions asking them to describe a
typical day in the life of their family, the history of how they came to share
chores and childcare, how they currently share, conflicts in how they
handled domestic labor, similarities and differences in their relationships
with their children, and whether they believed that men and women were
equally capable of caring for children. Participants were asked about their
jobs: how much time each put into paid work, how much each was paid,
whose job got priority, how each of them felt about their work, and how
paid work and family affected each other. Families of origin were also
explored in the interviews: the extent to which their own parents followed
gendered roles, and how they felt about the roles they witnessed growing up.
They were asked about praise and criticism they received for their nontraditional lives, and about whether there were government or employer programs or benefits that helped them share equally. Finally, couples were asked
why they thought they were different from other families.
The interviews were audio-taped, transcribed, and translated. The
transcripts were then “discussed” with the editors with the goal of identifying the factors that seemed to be operating to facilitate the couple’s
equality. After those discussions, drafts of the chapters were written and
revised.
The Analyses
Initially, as indicated above, a within-case analysis was conducted. Based
on close readings of the transcripts, the researchers and editors proposed
and discussed the reasons that lay behind the couples’ equality. Occasionally, researchers went back to the couple to clarify questions raised by
these discussions. Evidence from the interviews was marshaled to support
interpretations and a consensus was reached for that case.
Subsequently, a cross-case analysis was conducted. The transcripts
were read and reread multiple times. Using Nvivo, a qualitative software
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Past and Current Research
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package, to facilitate the qualitative analysis, the first editor and a
research assistant identified themes and developed codes, which were then
refined as needed. The research assistant did the initial coding, which was
then verified by the first editor with input from the second editor, altering
the codes to capture the significant themes uncovered. This approach
reflects the principles and practices identified by Tesch’s (1990) summary
of the methods of major qualitative researchers. Among qualitative
approaches it is best characterized as thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke,
2006). In addition, a number of variables in the transcripts were coded
quantitatively (e.g., who had the greater income), and analyzed via SPSS,
a statistical software package.
Ethical Issues
The most important ethical issue we faced was to protect the privacy and
confidentiality of the participants. To that end, all names used in the book
are pseudonyms, and any identifying characteristics have been disguised
with a comparable substitute.
Addressing the Literature
Creating Equality at Home goes beyond the standard social psychological
theories (i.e., relative resources, time availability, and gender ideology)
designed to account for the distribution of household labor between men
and women. While there is evidence that women’s contributions to the
household income, their limited time for domestic work, and husbands’
and wives’ egalitarian beliefs contribute to a relatively more egalitarian
household, the key word here is “relative.” Even when women earn pay
equal to their husbands, work as many hours in the labor force, and share
a nontraditional gender ideology with their husbands, on average they
still cook, clean, and change more diapers than their husbands do. We
aim to understand not simply families where the gender gap is reduced,
but families in which it disappears: equally sharing families.
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consciously creating equality
3
Israel
Ruth A. Gaunt
In many respects, Netta1 and Gadi are no different from many other
middle-class Jewish Israeli couples who choose to raise their children in
a rural environment away from the hustle and bustle of the city. Like most
Israeli couples, they both work full-time jobs and their children, 4-yearold Aya and 2-year-old Adam, attend daycare until 4:00 p.m. Netta and
Gadi’s child-centered approach is also typically Israeli, which gives their
children considerable freedom and autonomy. What makes Netta and
Gadi unique is the way they share childcare and housework. While
everywhere around them wives pick up the children from daycare and
do most of the housework and childcare, and husbands work longer paid
hours, Gadi and Netta have chosen differently.
“Exhausted in a Fair Way”
Netta and Gadi met at the university and moved in together during their
graduate studies. A few years later, when they were expecting their second
child, Adam, Gadi was offered a job as an applied researcher in an
institution located in Kibbutz Revivim – a small rural community in the
Negev desert. They decided to accept the offer and relocate. Adam was
born the same week. Netta took him and Aya to her parents for 3 days, “I
packed our stuff by myself and we moved,” Gadi recalls. They now live a
short walking distance from both their jobs and their children’s daycare.
Their division of childcare is, as Netta puts it, “fixed but constantly
changing.” Although Netta drops the children off in the mornings and
Gadi picks them up in the afternoon, their activities with their children the
1
The names of the participants in all chapters are pseudonyms. In some cases, details of
their lives (e.g., places of residence) were disguised to protect their anonymity.
29
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Creating Equality at Home
rest of the time are flexible and “divided in terms of what suits each best,”
Gadi says. He cites that morning as an example:
Well . . . I was up all night because I had some work to do, so . . . Aya woke up
relatively late, at 6:30. I greeted her, I let her watch a movie on the computer
while I dressed her, brushed her teeth, combed her hair, and yes, she was
caught up in the movie so I didn’t need to chase her . . . and then, when Adam
wakes up, it’s much simpler. You don’t need to do his hair, just change him and
dress him and he is ready.
And was that a typical morning? “It all depends,” Netta says. “Gadi often
works at night and then he is still awake when the kids wake up. And then
he doesn’t wake me up, he simply does whatever needs to be done.” “But
there are times,” Gadi adds, “when I don’t sleep properly for several days,
and I’m tired in the morning, and then Netta gets up and does it. Last
week, for example, she did it twice.”
Founded as a Jewish state, the
State of Israel has been involved
in armed conflict with the Palestinians and the neighboring
Arab states since its establishment in 1948. Of its 9 million
citizens, 74% are Jews and
21% are Palestinian Arabs, the
majority of whom are Muslim
(85%) (Israel Central Bureau of
Statistics [ICBS], 2017; 2019).
Israel is a densely populated
and very urbanized country.
Over 90% of its population lives
in urban areas (ICBS, 2017).
Israel formally grants women equality with respect to legal, economic,
and political rights. Nevertheless, a unique combination of demographic,
economic, and religious forces has contributed to the gender and family
norms that differ from those in other developed countries. Since the early
1950s, the Israeli state has promoted high fertility rates alongside the
integration of women into the workforce (Izraeli, 1992). These policies
were aimed to achieve a Jewish majority, and to ensure a labor force
sufficiently large to develop the economy as part of Israel’s nation-building
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Israel
31
project. Women earn two-thirds of what men earn, but that is partially
accounted for by their shorter paid work hours (45 vs. 37, respectively)
(ICBS, 2018). Even while working full-time, women are concentrated in
sectors where they often finish working in the afternoon and can then return
home to care for children (Frenkel, 2008).
These state policies, combined with the dominance of Jewish religious
tradition and the massive waves of immigration from North African and
Asian countries, resulted in a society that is family oriented, child-centered
and strongly pro-natalist (Katz & Lavee, 2005). Parenthood is the predominant normative requirement and Israeli women have more children than
women in other developed countries (an average of 3.1 compared to 1.7 in
the OECD countries) (Mandel & Birgier, 2016). Childlessness is rare and
divorce rates are relatively low (Remennick, 2000; Nahir, 2016; YeshuaKatz, 2019). Childlessness, full-time delegation of care, and stay-at-home
motherhood are all socially frowned upon (Frenkel, 2008), and the dualearner family pattern is the most common in Israel. Over 80% of Jewish
Israeli mothers are in the labor force (ICBS, 2018).
These high employment rates are supported by government policies and
the availability of public and private childcare services. Subsidized centers
that provide full daycare for babies and toddlers from the age of 3 months
are widespread, and nearly all 3-year-old Jewish children attend either
private or state-supported nursery schools (Israel National Council for the
Child, 2015). It is common and socially acceptable for Israeli women to
return to full-time employment after their 14 weeks of paid maternity (Katz
& Lavee, 2005). Despite their extensive participation in the workforce,
Israeli women continue to perform the lion’s share of family work. Recent
studies reported that women did at least 7 weekly hours more than men of
care and housework in about 75% of Israeli couples (DeRose et al., 2019)
and all the cooking and laundry in more than 60% of the couples (Mandel
& Birgier, 2016).
At around 7:00 a.m., Netta takes the children to daycare on her way to
work. Although the route itself is only a few minutes on foot, dropping
them off takes closer to an hour as each child gets some individual
attention, play time, or “reading a story or two” before saying goodbye.
Gadi picks up the children at 4:00 p.m., but they rarely head back
home. Instead, Netta joins them and they go to the playground, meet
friends, or spend the afternoon in the kibbutz swimming pool during the
long summer months. Gadi explains that because of the desert climate,
“most families are like ‘let’s rush back to the air-conditioned house and
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Creating Equality at Home
stay there until the sun goes down, and then we can go out again.’ But
with us it’s different, both Netta and I love the heat, so we stay outside
and do things.”
In the evening they come back home for supper, and then Gadi bathes
the children while Netta washes the dishes. Netta reads a bedtime story
and tucks them into bed. “But recently he felt he had enough with bathing
them so we swapped,” she says. “So he washed the dishes and read the
stories. But usually he bathes them and I’m in charge of the dishes and
stories.”
The evenings are devoted to reading, watching movies together, or
taking turns going to exercise classes. They usually stay up until midnight,
although once in a while each of them feels worn-out and “collapses on
the bed” straight after the children are tucked into theirs.
Flexible division characterizes the way they respond to their children’s
calls at night as well. “Many times I’m still awake or already awake, and
I go,” Gadi explains. “But if both of us are asleep, many times Netta goes.
It’s simply the one who is more conscious.”
They both believe that their relationships with the children are equally
close. “My daughter does her job testing her limits and all that stuff,”
Netta says:
but she frequently tells me, “Mommy you are sweet” or “Mommy I love you.”
On the other hand, of course there are days when Aya fights with me, and then
she wants “Daddy, only Daddy,” and the reverse, after she fights with him,
“Only Mommy, only Mommy,” so I guess it’s the same.
When facing dilemmas regarding the children’s education, Netta and Gadi
have long discussions which eventually lead to a joint decision. “We don’t
argue at all, about anything,” Netta says, and mentions a recent example:
We’re having bedwetting problems with our daughter, so we had a rather
stormy – discussion; I don’t know how to define it, not an argument but simply
a misunderstanding. He tried to tell me something, and I tried to tell him, but
we were unsuccessful over and over, until finally, after a long time trying to
clarify the issue, we finally were able to explain to one another what we meant
and to reach some kind of decision . . . But we are very flexible, we re-assess the
situation all the time: every day, every hour, whenever there is a need.
Do they ever experience conflicts over who does what with the children? Both of them deny that: “No, I don’t remember us saying to each
other, ‘I did this yesterday, now it’s your turn,’” Gadi says. “And what
about one of you just feeling unfairly exhausted?” “Not unfairly,” Gadi
responds. “The kids definitely let us feel exhausted, but in a fair way.”
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Israel
33
“Things that Suit Us More”
Gadi and Netta are not keen on housework. When asked who does the
cleaning, both gave the same response, “Well, as you can see – no one
does.” Nevertheless, their house does look nice and tidy. Gadi says, “I can’t
tell you who does it more. Actually Netta is more aware of cleanliness than
I am, I mean I can tolerate a lot more mess than she can. Both of us aren’t
too enthusiastic, but when it is necessary, I do it or she does it.”
They specialize more in the division of cooking and washing; each of
them does what the other dislikes most. During the week, the children eat
in the daycare; the only “real cooking” is done on the weekend. Netta
usually cooks the meat and Gadi prepares rice and salad. “Let’s say Netta
doesn’t like frying, so I do frying,” Gadi adds. When it comes to laundry,
Netta washes, Gadi hangs it up and takes it down, and Netta folds and
puts the clean clothes away. Gadi explains:
Look, there are things that suit us more, so, for example, I hate loading up the
dishwasher – I dislike dealing with all those little things, and the cups and all
that. I can do it. I do it when the sink is overflowing and I get annoyed, then
I do it. But first I wait for Netta to do it. On the other hand, Netta doesn’t like
hanging up the laundry, so when I’m away on reserve duty for three days,
I come home to four loads of laundry [laughs] – “Please hang everything up
now.” It’s not that she can’t do it, she just doesn’t want to.
Netta claims more responsibility for the management and planning
around the children’s activities. Bringing a change of clothes and diapers
to daycare, a flower wreath for the Shavuot holiday, or a white shirt for
Passover – “I’m the one who takes care of these kinds of things.” On the
other hand, “Gadi knows exactly what’s needed in the afternoon backpack and whether there’s enough,” Netta says. “I have no idea. I go out
with the kids and forget the backpack, and then find out I don’t have any
of the things they need. Gadi always takes it everywhere he goes.”
“Not Very Much into Our Careers”
Because they live and work in a small Kibbutz, no time is wasted on
commuting or traffic. Gadi’s job is more flexible and enables him to
respond to midday calls from the daycare, “Let’s say they call from
daycare to say that they’ve run out of diapers, or we didn’t bring the
pacifier, right? Someone has to go and bring those things, so I do it.”
Gadi likes his job as a researcher and feels that it suits him well. It is
professionally fulfilling and he enjoys the considerable autonomy. When
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Creating Equality at Home
the pressure is on to complete a project for a deadline, he rarely stays
longer hours at the office. Instead, he maintains the daily afternoon
routine with the children, and starts working again after they are asleep.
Let’s say there is something I have to submit, and I wasn’t able to finish it on
time, so many times . . . I leave it, go away, spend time with the family, and then
later I return to it. It’s not like “first I’ll finish my work and only afterwards I’ll
talk to the family,” not with me.
If he works late at night, he can sleep in the morning when the children are
off to daycare.
At the time of the interview, Netta’s job was less satisfying. She was
working full-time in an administrative position in the kibbutz, and earned
significantly less than Gadi. However, both of them described her job as a
temporary solution, and said she was looking for a more challenging job.
Indeed, one year later, she had already switched to a management position related to her background as an ecologist, and was very satisfied
with this better-paying and professionally rewarding job.
Although both Gadi and Netta are highly educated, their joint income
at the time of the interview was slightly below average, and their careers
were not given high priority. Netta explained:
Because both of us, I think, are people who are not very much into money and
not very much into our careers; we can devote time to the family in peace and
arrange our lives so that we can be a family. Supporting the family financially,
staying late at work, advancing our careers – all these are secondary, and are
not particularly important.
“It’s Not Mine – It’s Ours!”
Netta and Gadi’s equal sharing goes back to the very beginning of their
lives as a couple. Netta came up with the idea to move in together after
she graduated and had to leave the student dorm. Gadi said, “yes,” and
they started sharing an apartment and all the housework involved.
Although they were doing everything together – shopping, cleaning,
cooking – Netta was unhappy about the division of labor. “At some
point I think I felt that I was doing more than him. Not that I was actually
doing more, but that the responsibility for getting things done was
mine . . . It’s not as if he didn’t do, but I had to tell him ‘do.’”
Netta’s discontent did not last long because she soon got into action:
So I told him, “Listen, this house is not just mine, it’s ours. The chore is not
mine and the responsibility is not mine, it’s also yours. Look around and take
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responsibility whenever you see something that needs to be done.” And that’s
it; since that day on, “it’s not just mine.”
This rule of shared responsibility was then put into practice: “Afterwards,
you know, there are things we already agreed on: how we would
clean the house, ‘I’ll do these things and you do those,’ and after a long
time when we’d had enough of it we’d switch – I’ll do your things
and you do mine.”
A History of Juggling
Netta and Gadi shared the care of their first baby equally. When Aya was
born, Gadi worked mainly from home on his postdoctoral research job,
and Netta took a 4-month maternity leave from her work as a research
technician. As the baby demanded 24-hour care, they decided to split the
job between them so that Gadi was in charge of the nights, and Netta had
the days. Netta explains:
She had lots of gas, she used to make noises all the time, 24 hours a day, so it’s
impossible to sleep next to a thing like that, which makes noises all the time.
And you had to actually turn her over every 20 minutes . . . so we used to take
turns. She slept in the living room next to him, and I was in my room, trying to
sleep as much as I could.
Breastfeeding, however, had to be done day and night, so it was Gadi’s
job to bring the baby to Netta for feeding and to respond to any other
needs during his night shift.
After the first 4 months, Netta went back to her job, and Gadi took
care of Aya at home while doing his research. Usually Israeli women
return to full-time employment after birth, as paid maternity leave only
covers 3 months, and one income is not enough. So Netta’s colleagues
were not surprised to see her there. “If there was any reaction at work it
was like, ‘so why didn’t you come back right after 3 months, why only
now?’” she laughs.
Combining a full-time job with breastfeeding was tricky, though. They
both vividly remember the ordeal they went through when Netta had to
go on a 2-week fieldwork project, which involved “ensnaring gerbils at
night” and sleeping out in the field.
So I traveled to do my stuff and he would come with her all the way from our
home to the research site, just so that I could nurse her. He’d sleep there with
her all night, then he would drive back home in the morning. At noon I’d come
home, nurse her, return to work in the afternoon, and then he would drive
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36
Creating Equality at Home
down again in the afternoon. That’s the way it was for those 2 weeks . . . he was
actually chasing me back and forth, back and forth, every day . . . it seemed
completely natural to me. Today I think that I was nuts.
Although exhausting, this struggle to combine a full-time job with breastfeeding lasted for a short period of time, since Aya soon started to eat
solid food, and could do with just morning and evening nursing. Gadi’s
struggle to combine his own full-time job with caring for the baby was
more prolonged and just as demanding.
His research job also included fieldwork: he had to travel to Tel Aviv
and obtain samples of insects from people’s backyards:
So I used to take Aya with me to Tel Aviv and I had no problem being with her
for entire days. I used to prepare a pack with chopped food that I cooked. I’d
leave with bags packed to the brim, and we’d be off – we would walk the
streets for an entire day, and when we’d get back, she’d already be asleep.
Surprisingly, Gadi reports that carrying a baby helped him:
We’d approach people, knock on their doors . . . I would stop an old lady who
normally would have slammed the door in my face, [but] since I had my baby,
the woman would ask me “What do you want?” I’d tell her about the study
and everything, and she would say, “no problem” and “what an adorable
baby” [imitates the woman], and it was great!
Nevertheless, working from home and writing research reports while
caring for the baby became more and more challenging as Aya got older
and demanded more attention. “She slept less and less and had
demands,” Netta recalls. “She did not agree to just lie there on the floor
with her toys and be quiet; she wanted to go outside and take a walk,
and she did not let him do anything else.” As time went by, Gadi was less
able to do his work, which made him “more and more irritable and
jumpy because he felt that he wasn’t doing what he was paid to do.” “I
became extremely irritable,” Gadi confirms. “I told Netta, ‘I have no
problems raising Aya, it’s fun, and I have no problems doing my postdoc. But doing both together – that’s tough.’ Sometimes the pressure was
really tough.”
So by the age of 1, baby Aya started attending daycare in a nearby
kibbutz. Gadi would pick her up in the afternoon and “roam all over the
kibbutz till it got dark or even after, or sometimes we’d go to the
swimming pool or the cowsheds. We’d go on hikes and Aya would show
me what they did in daycare that day.”
The division of labor changed considerably one year later, when their
second child, Adam, was born. Gadi got a job offer which posed a
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difficult dilemma for the family: taking the job meant they had to move,
and Netta would have to give up her own job:
It was a difficult decision, because I had a really good job that I liked very
much, but . . . I realized that I had got to a point where I had started to feel that
I had enough of it . . . so I said, “OK, this is a one-time opportunity for him to
get a job in his profession, and for me – I can do anything.”
So Netta quit her job and the family moved. For one year, Netta stayed at
home with baby Adam. After the first year, she found a job. With both of
them employed again, their division of childcare returned to being equal.
Rejecting Gender-Based Abilities
Gadi and Netta’s views, priorities, and personalities combine to produce
their equal sharing. Above all, it is obvious that their division of labor
reflects a conscious, purposeful choice, guided by their egalitarian i…