Gender and care in the context of rare diseases: exploring nuances of emotional support and the division of household labor

This article explores the ways in which having a rare skin disease (pemphigus) can reveal and redefine individuals' interpersonal relationships and how they experience and use the support of loved ones. It examines two aspects of "care": emotional support and practical support (through the division of household labor). It takes a relational ontological approach that is especially attentive to the biographical repercussions of care, and its gendered dimensions in particular. Our analysis is mainly based on interviews with 25 individuals in France (13 women and 12 men) with pemphigus, a rare disease that affects the skin and mucus membranes that can be controlled through long-term medical treatment. Its burn-like lesions often take the form of blisters, making pemphigus a bullous disease. Use of the concepts of "caring for" and "caring about" prove heuristic in studying care relations, especially when taking a gendered perspective and probing underlying tensions. The distinction between caring "for" and "about" is also relevant to comprehending biographical disruption, which mainly results from a lack of emotional support when the negotiation of practical support has made it possible to normalize everyday life.

US and Chinese preschoolers normalize household labor inequality

Across many cultural contexts, the majority of women conduct the majority of their household labor. This gendered distribution of labor is often unequal, and thus represents one of the most frequently experienced forms of daily inequality because it occurs within one's own home. Young children are often passive observers of their family's distribution of labor, and yet little is known about the developmental onset of their perceptions of it. By the preschool age, children also show strong normative feelings about both equal resource distribution and gender stereotypes. To investigate the developmental onset of children's recognition of the (in)equality of household labor, we interviewed 3 to 10-y-old children in two distinct cultural contexts (US and China) and surveyed their caregivers about who does more household labor across a variety of tasks. Even at the youngest ages and in both cultural contexts, children's reports largely matched their parents', with both populations reporting that mothers do the majority of household labor. Both children and parents judged this to be generally fair, suggesting that children are observant of the gendered distribution of labor within their households, and show normalization of inequality from a young age. Our results point to preschool age as a critical developmental time period during which it is important to have parent-child discussions about structural constraints surrounding gender norms and household labor.

He's Working from Home and I'm at Home Trying to Work: Experiences of Childcare and the Work-Family Balance Among Mothers During COVID-19

This article captures mothers' experiences of the work-family balance and division of household labor during the initial COVID-19 lockdown. Interviews were conducted with twenty-five academics and twenty professionals in other fields. Mothers who split childcare with their partners had a more positive experience of the work-family balance during lockdown, compared with mothers who did the majority of the childcare. The present study adds a new wrinkle into the literature on flexibility and work-family balance: the perception of flexibility and its impact on the division of labor. Academic mothers, who had always had highly "flexible" jobs, were less likely to split childcare with their partners pre-pandemic and thus less likely to have positive experiences of work-family balance during the Spring 2020 lockdown. I argue that perceived flexibility of a partner's job affected allocation of childcare during the initial stages of the pandemic, a moment that wreaked significant harm on women's careers.

Merging the public and private spheres of women's work: Narratives from women street food vendors during Covid-19 crisis

Feminist economists have long questioned the dichotomy between the "private" versus "public" spheres of women's work and have argued for a more nuanced understanding of the marketable paid work and the unpaid work of household caregiving. This paper focuses on women street food vendors' (SFVs) experiences before and during Covid-19 pandemic to understand how street food vending as a livelihood activity interacts with social dimensions like gender and division of labor. Through multiple in-depth interviews with 23 women street vendors in Bengaluru, India, before and during the pandemic, we show that there is a blurring of the dichotomy between the work done in the private and public spaces before the pandemic, which is disrupted by Covid-19 crisis. The first half of the paper explores the household labor dynamics in the context of paid and unpaid work of women and explains how the women SFVs, capitalizing on their existing skills of "cooking," were able to gain agency and recognition for themselves within the households. The second half of the paper focuses on the narratives of the same women SFVs during the first wave of the Covid pandemic and the subsequent lockdown. We find that the Covid crisis brought back the dichotomy between private and public spheres, making it more pronounced, with women losing their control over the public sphere and their work being restricted only to the private sphere.

Cohort Trends in the Gender Distribution of Household Tasks in the United States and the Implications for Understanding Disability

Objectives: Measures of disability depend on health and social roles in a given environment. Yet, social roles can change over time as they have by gender. We document how engagement in Instrumental Activities of Daily Living (IADLs) is shifting by gender and birth cohort among older adults, and the challenges these shifts can create for population-level estimates of disability. Method: We used the Health and Retirement Study (N = 25,047) and multinomial logistic regression models with an interaction term between gender and birth cohort to predict limitation and nonperformance relative to no difficulty conducting IADLs. Results: Nonperformance of IADLs have significantly decreased among younger cohorts. Women in younger cohorts were more likely to use a map, whereas men in younger cohorts were more likely to prepare meals and shop. Discussion: Failing to account for gender and cohort changes in IADL, performance may lead to systematic bias in estimates of population-level disability.

Is Maternal Income in Childhood Associated With Adolescent Health and Behavioral Outcomes?

Maternal income increases immediate investment in children for food, child care, and health care, but whether maternal income influences longer term health and behavioral outcomes is unknown. Using data from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development, we examine the association between maternal income in early and later childhood on body mass index percentile, problem behaviors, and self-reported health status at age 15 among a sample of children (N = 1,283) whose mothers were employed at at least one observation time point between birth and age 15 (1991-2005). When controlling for family income (minus maternal income) and maternal employment characteristics, higher maternal income during early childhood was significantly associated with fewer adolescent problem behaviors. Maternal income during early childhood may influence adolescent behavioral outcomes. These findings suggest that increased maternal income, a positive externality of maternal employment, may increase the net benefit of maternal employment for child behavior.

Lesbian women and household labor division: A systematic review of scholarly research from 2000 to 2015

Recent studies have begun to attend to distribution of household labor within same-gender couples compared to heterosexual couples, yet much of the available research with lesbian couples has attempted to superimpose division of household labor frameworks developed with heterosexual couples (e.g., gender role socialization, exchange bargaining theories) to fit the experiences of same-gender couples. Using two academic search databases, the present article provides a systematic review of the available 28 peer-reviewed articles published from 2000-2015 about lesbian partnerships and household labor divisions. Results indicate that lesbian couples engage in a more equal distribution of household labor than heterosexual couples, and that lesbian women often opt to eschew traditional gendered divisions of chores in favor of other factors such as quality of task or ability. The systematic review uncovered notable constraints in the demography of participants (e.g., race, socioeconomic status, geographic location) across studies. Strategies for deepening the depth and breadth of this line of work for future researchers, and implications for relationship satisfaction are also discussed.

Egalitarianism, Housework, and Sexual Frequency in Marriage

Changes in the nature of marriage have spurred a debate about the consequences of shifts to more egalitarian relationships, and media interest in the debate has crystallized around claims that men who participate in housework get more sex. However, little systematic or representative research supports the claim that women, in essence, exchange sex for men's participation in housework. Although research and theory support the expectation that egalitarian marriages are higher quality, other studies underscore the ongoing importance of traditional gender behavior and gender display in marriage. Using data from Wave II of the National Survey of Families and Households, this study investigates the links between men's participation in core (traditionally female) and non-core (traditionally male) household tasks and sexual frequency. Results show that both husbands and wives in couples with more traditional housework arrangements report higher sexual frequency, suggesting the importance of gender display rather than marital exchange for sex between heterosexual married partners.

Gender Dynamics in Mexican American Families: Connecting Mothers', Fathers', and Youths' Experiences

Study goals were to examine the conditions under which congruent and incongruent patterns of parents' division of household labor and gender role attitudes emerged, and the implications of these patterns for youth gender development. Questionnaire and phone diary data were collected from mothers, fathers, and youths from 236 Mexican American families in the southwestern US. Preliminary cluster analysis identified three patterns: Traditional divisions of labor and traditional attitudes, egalitarian divisions of labor and egalitarian attitudes, and an incongruent pattern, with a traditional division of labor but egalitarian attitudes. MANOVAs, and follow-up, mixed- and between-group ANOVAs, revealed that these groups of families differed in parents' time constraints, socioeconomic resources, and cultural orientations. Mothers in the congruent egalitarian group worked more hours and earned higher incomes as compared to mothers in the congruent traditional and incongruent groups, and the emergence of the incongruent group was grounded in within-family, inter-parental differences in work hours and incomes. Parents' patterns of gendered practices and beliefs were linked to their youths' housework participation, time with mothers versus fathers, and gender role attitudes. Youths in the congruent traditional group had more traditional gender role attitudes than those in the congruent egalitarian and incongruent groups, and gender atypical housework participation and time with parents were only observed in the congruent egalitarian group. Findings demonstrate the utility of a within-family design to understand complex gendered phenomena, and highlight the multidimensional nature of gender and the importance of contextualizing the study of ethnic minorities.

Allocation of household responsibilities influences change in dietary behavior

This study was undertaken to understand dietary behavior as situated within the household, an important social context that serves to either inhibit or promote a healthy diet. Data were collected as part of a worksite-based health behavior intervention trial that took place between 1999 and 2003 in small manufacturing businesses in New England, U.S.A. The subjects were a cohort of 790 male and female workers who participated in the intervention trial and responded to both the baseline and the 18-month follow-up surveys. Regression models were built to determine whether proportion of household responsibility predicted daily fruit and vegetable consumption and weekly red meat consumption at 18-months. The results indicate that participants who were responsible for earning most or all of the money to support the household ate more servings of fruits and vegetables per day at 18-month follow-up than those without this responsibility. Further, those responsible for earning about half ate fewer servings of red meat than those responsible for earning most or all of the money to support the household. The results for red meat consumption differed by sex, such that responsibility for more than half or less than half of the money to support the household had different effects for men and women. The results of this study demonstrate that the distribution of household responsibilities can be an important factor in determining the effectiveness of a worksite-based health behavior intervention and that these effects can be different for women versus men.

Money Isn't Everything: Wives' Earnings and Housework Time

The autonomy perspective of housework time predicts that wives' housework time falls steadily as their earnings rise, because wives use additional financial resources to outsource or forego time in housework. We argue, however, that wives' ability to reduce their housework varies by household task. That is, we expect that increases in wives' earnings will allow them to forego or outsource some tasks, but not others. As a result, we hypothesize more rapid declines in wives' housework time for low-earning wives as their earnings increase than for high-earning wives who have already stopped performing household tasks that are the easiest and cheapest to outsource or forego. Using fixed-effects models and data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we find considerable support for our hypothesis. We further conclude that past evidence that wives who out-earn their husbands spend additional time in housework to compensate for their gender-deviant success in the labor market is due to the failure to account for the non-linear relationship between wives' absolute earnings and their housework time.