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With two working parents suddenly having to juggle full-time care-taking, we see peoples' implicit assumptions of their own value coming to the fore. Men think their work matters more than their wives' work and that their wives will pick up the slack; it turns out they're right. https://twitter.com/llerer/status/1252957889725169664
I wrote about this in my newsletter last week & cover it in my upcoming book: https://jill.substack.com/p/patriarchy-kills
Across class lines, women do more at home. Both spouses often value men's paid work more - even when the woman makes more money, they don't consider her the family breadwinner.
Across class lines, women do more at home. Both spouses often value men's paid work more - even when the woman makes more money, they don't consider her the family breadwinner.
If a woman is financially dependent on a man, she is more likely to do more of the housework. The more financially dependent women are, the more work they do. Men who are financially dependent on women do not behave the same way - they don't pick up more on the homefront.
From the newsletter:
Men also over-estimate how much work they do around the house and in caring for kids. They think they do "half." They do not. Basically, men, you need to be doing about 70 percent of the at-home work and childcare. Then you will likely ACTUALLY be at 50%. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/12/upshot/men-do-more-at-home-but-not-as-much-as-they-think-they-do.html
Many men say they want "egalitarian marriages." But many of those same men also say that if they can't make egalitarianism work, their careers will have to come first. And guess what? They don't make egalitarianism work. So their wives make the sacrifices.
Men are indeed spending more time with their kids than they used to. But that's because dads in the 60s spent, on average, 21 minutes a day with their children. They devoted 4 hours a week to housework, compared to their wives' 37(!). Now dads average 1 hour of childcare per day.
Crap not 37, 32! But still, MANY TIMES HIGHER.
There is simply a basic assumption that paid male labor is inherently more valuable than paid female labor, even when that female labor is literally paid more. That assumption is also why, women women begin to dominate what used to be male-coded jobs, pay and prestige falls.
At home, this implicit belief that men's work is more "real" and more valuable is part of the reason both partners prioritize men's paid work over women's. This was easier to obscure pre-covid, when kids were in school & parents weren't doing EVERYTHING at home 24 hours a day.
Nor have supposedly progressive Millennials - many (most?) of today's parents of young children - managed to substantially shift this. Which is why so many mothers are so shocked, hurt & frustrated right now: A lot of them believed their relationship was a more or less equal one.
(I suspect this is especially jarring for the many hard-working and ambitious women who believed their intelligence and ambition was part of the attraction, and are now seeing their husbands actually put their own ambition first; the wife's was nice, but it's negotiable).
One study that struck me, despite a small sample size: In couples where the woman brings in 80-100% of the family income, just 38% of spouses (husbands and wives alike) said she was the "breadwinner." Most did not imbue her with that authority. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0192513X16676857
The better-off you are, the easier it is to obscure these at-home gender inequities: you can hire a housekeeper, a nanny, a babysitter. But even in low-income households, there's public school, often (female) family members to help with childcare. Covid pulled back the cover.
(And of course the overwhelming majority of the people who help obscure gender inequities between heterosexual parents and keep the myth of egalitarian marriage & childrearing alive are women, from nannies to childcare workers to public school teachers).
Anyway, being stuck at home suddenly having to do 100% of the housekeeping & childcare 100% of the time - which virtually no one did before this - is really making clear that heterosexual partnerships, especially if kids are in the picture, remain profoundly unequal. Because men.
But what I do find interesting is the mental hoops women & men alike jump through to justify his work coming first. If he makes more, that's the reason. If he doesn't, then she's just "better" with the kids, or maybe he's more easily distractible & not used to working from home.
You see these same mental gymnastics when it comes to other clear gender inequities: Women taking men's last names in marriage, women quitting their jobs to stay home full time. There are always justifications that almost never apply to men in the same position. It's fascinating.
And it's not surprising - self-justification is not unique to reinforcing unequal gender roles - but a collective failure to really look this in the face and to veil them in the language of individual or family "choice" is part of why these inequities persist.
