Work and the Household

Essay # 55408

A look at the growing research and theories into the domestic division of labor and thus, why it still tends to remain women's work.

1,672 words () | 9 sources | MLA | 2004 United Kingdom

Paper Summary:

This paper examines how research evidence suggests that housework tasks and to a lesser extent childcare ones are not distributed evenly between husband and wife. It notes that if there has been a change in the domestic division of labor over the last generation or so, as many contend, it has not been particularly radical. It looks at how the help many husbands give their wives around the house appears to be limited and occasional and how few marriages could in this sense be called genuinely symmetrical.

From the Paper:

"In his review of research on the division of household labor during the 1990's, Coltrane (2000) concluded that although men's relative contributions have increased, women still do, at least twice as much, routine housework as men. This time period has seen dramatic increases in labor force participation of married women, with an increasing number of wives becoming primary breadwinners in their households. Despite these changes however, women are still thought to do the majority of the housework. In the face of these shifts from traditional gender-based economic roles, the fundamental question in this area has come to be: Why does housework remain women's work? The consensus of the empirical literature is that the division of labor tends to be relatively traditional."