Re: gender & work time
On Apr 19, 2007, at 8:06 PM, bitch@pulpculture.org wrote:
Moreover, it also depends on what kind of work we’re talking. If
you just talk normal “chores” you leave out a whole bunch of stuff that
people don’t consider such as “caring work” and “emotional work” (see Arlie
Hochschild’s work).
About that, the authors say:
The fact [i.e. the equality of work time] is thus not new in the
sociology literature, although it is new in the economics
literature. The difficulty, however, is that it has been swamped by
claims in widely circulated sociological studies (Hochschild, 1997,
and earlier work) based on ethnographic research on a few non- randomly chosen households that women’s total work significantly
exceeds men’s. Indeed, even sociologists who have demonstrated it
(e.g., Mattingly and Bianchi, 2003, for the United States, and
Bittman and Wajcman, 2000, for several countries), quickly move
beyond it to focus on showing that women’s work is more onerous
than men’s, and why women’s leisure provides less pleasure.