Module #3 Spotlight on Sociology and supplemental topics

This section in each model is a way to emphasize key ideas (often sociologically-related) that enrich and expand the material in the textbook and the Chapter Notes. The instructor will expand the topics occasionally to include specific contemporary and relevant information and insights.

Chapter 3 in the textbook discusses material related to various aspects of gender roles (theories, changes, etc.) and agents of socialization.

This Spotlight draws attention to the following topics of gendered division of labor, gender and communications within the family, and household bargaining.

Gender and Household Labor

An FAQ on what the research says about the gendered division of labor

Brigid Schulte

In American families, time-use data shows that, even though men have increased the amount of time they spend on housework and caring for family members in recent decades, women are still doing more - about twice as much as men. That’s true even when women work full-time, when they’re the primary breadwinners, and whether or not they have children. Although, when families have young children, the additional burden on mothers is stark. And none of that data counts the “invisible” mental labor of planning, organizing and logistics that women tend to do. (Just having a man in the house tends to increase the load for women - partnered mothers do more housework and child care than single mothers.)

Men, on the other hand, spend more time at work. And they have more leisure time.

When men do take on household chores, research has found the chores tend to be gendered as well, with men doing the outdoor chores or one-off repair projects that can be done as their schedules permit. Women, on the other hand, tend to be responsible for the time-demanding daily or weekly tasks like laundry, grocery shopping, cooking, cleaning and child care that can’t be put off. When it comes to caregiving, men tend to be the “fun” parent, or take on educational activities, while mothers, again, tend to be primarily responsible for the day to day, time-sensitive caring. (Men also tend to think they do more than women say they do.)

This “gendered division of labor” as sociologists call it, is a big part of what fuels the pay and opportunity gap for women in the workplace, where women, too, are often unconsciously asked to do the low-value “office housework,” and has stalled progress towards real gender equality.

The unfair division of labor is a major source of strife among partners and in families, and a big factor in women seeking to end relationships. Two-thirds of high-achieving women cite a lack of household support from their husbands as one of the top reasons they decide to leave full-time work. Same sex partners, on the other hand, report less tension and more sharing around household labor, because there are no traditional gender stereotypes to fall back on, so partners are forced to communicate and negotiate better in order to get things done.

Learning to better share the labor at home, which then creates more time for leisure and connection for everyone, has tangible benefits to health, happiness, relationship quality and gender equality - women’s economic advancement at work and men’s evolving role as involved caregivers at home:

Several studies have found that when men make a “fair contribution” to housework, couples report more and better sex.
Daughters who see their father doing household chores have broader career aspirations.
Women who receive “tangible support” from their partners - sharing chores and caregiving - do better at work and are more likely to advance.
Men who are involved fathers not only boost their children’s self-esteem, they experience greater job satisfaction and more work-family enrichment rather than conflict.
Actively taking care of loved ones helps people live longer.

https://www.newamerica.org/better-life-lab/better-life-lab-experiments/bllx-blogs/gender-and-household-labor/

The Influence of Gender on Communication Style

Debbie Churgai

The idea that men and women are different in their ability to communicate has been one of the most popular beliefs about gender differences that exists to this day. Whether it is with words, tone of voice, emotional expression, or body language, the way in which males and females communicate have been explored in a variety of ways to distinguish the characteristics that makes us so different (Disch, 2009). It may seem obvious that males and females tend to use different communication styles. It is commonly generalized that females communicate in a more indirect, elaborate, and emotional, sense that can reflect uncertainty, tentativeness, and a lack of authority. While males are perceived to have a communication style that is direct, succinct, and instrumental. Although it may seem that the female communication style might be the weaker form, it can also be said that females are more able to establish a rapport that encourages response because of their ability to empathize and connect. While males conversational style usually centers around their own independence, female communication style reflect their need for connectedness (von Hippel, Wiryakusuma, Bowden, & Shochet, 2011).

One major difference between male and female communication style is in the amount of emotion that is used in their conversations. Gendered cultural norms such as emotional expression and communication styles are both learned in childhood through interactions with family members and friends. Specifically, conversations that children have with their peers help them learn appropriate emotional responses which develop their socio-cognitive understanding. For example, females use more affiliative language whereas males use more assertive language in conversations with both parents and peers (Tenenbaum, Ford, & Alkhedairy, 2011).

Gender differences in communication styles have also been found in the value of comforting versus ego support. Ego support refers to the way people make others feel good about themselves and the things they have accomplished in life, while comforting support refers to the way in which a person can help to alleviate another person’s emotional distress. Women tend to place a greater value towards these skills emphasizing the importance of communication that expresses feelings and emotions. Men, on the other hand, place a higher importance on active forms of communication such as persuasion and narrative techniques (Mortenson, 2002).

One area in which the disparity in communication styles can lead to inequality simply based on our biology is in schools and the workplace. In most professional settings, leadership and confidence are highly valued traits for top level positions. Based on gender alone, males may be viewed as assertiveness and self-reliant while females can be seen as less competent compared to males for leadership roles. This is one reason that females can often be automatically viewed as a less desirable candidate when applying for certain positions. Gender-based misconceptions that reinforce stereotypes about women being less competent than men can cause women’s capabilities in leadership to be undervalued (von Hippel, Wiryakusuma, Bowden, & Shochet, 2011).

Many gender stereotypes tend to lead to a way of thinking that show men and women maintain different traits and attributes and that the traits that males have are more highly valued than the traits that females possess. In general, the traits associated with males are perceived as more important for educational and professional success. Research that focus on sex-role stereotypes like these can influence perceptions based on gender alone, whereas a certain behavior from a male could be perceived in a positive light but when the same behavior is performed by a female it can be viewed as negative (Steckler, & Rosenthal, 1985). For instance, in school a boy who asks too many questions may be perceived as someone striving to gain more knowledge about what is being taught while a girl who asks too many questions might be perceived as someone who does not understand what is being taught.

To help change this way of thinking, gender research that explores what makes men and women alike, rather than different is gaining popularity. Many people do not believe that large differences between how the sexes communicate actually exist and that continuing the research that explores these differences can be dangerous by working to promote self-fulfilling prophecies (Disch, 2009). The differences in the words we use, the tone of voice, and the way we express our emotion can all cause some form of misunderstanding with communication. The way in which men and women communicate, whether through verbal or nonverbal means, can present differences in how the speaker and the addressee are perceived (Steckler, & Rosenthal, 1985). Knowing what these differences are can help lessen misunderstandings and build a greater path of communication between the sexes.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/influence-gender-communication-style-debbie-churgai

Household Bargaining

Why do women who work outside the home continue to perform a greater amount of household labor than men with similar earnings and working hours? More generally we can also ask—why do women tend to do more labor overall, and to have less leisure time, than men?

First, let me add some detail to the phenomenon. Findings from sociology and economics are that 1) as women’s share of household earnings increases, they perform a smaller portion of household labor and 2) nonetheless, regardless of circumstances in the household, women average significantly more household labor than men (Brines, 1994; Bittman et al., 2003; Gupta, 1999; Greenstein, 2000).³ In addition, the United Nation’s Human Development Report in 1995 found that in thirty-one countries women consistently enjoyed less leisure time and worked longer hours when household labor and labor force work were combined.

Sociologists have considered various explanations for this data. The perspective of “exchange theory” suggests that when women earn more relative to their husbands, this translates into a more powerful bargaining position which they can use to lessen their portion of household labor. Sanjiv Gupta’s “autonomy” model holds that women’s household labor decreases as a function of their absolute earnings, with little dependence on their relative income, or their husband’s absolute income (Gupta, 2006, 2007). In other words, household labor is the domain of women, and wealthier women get out of it by paying others to do the work. Both frameworks explain the variation in bargaining across households, but not the general social trend where women work more. Sociologists acknowledge that the large gap between men and women generally in doing household labor is a result of gender norms. These theories do not, though, say much about how these norms emerge in the first place.

Economists have also generated a substantive body of work intended to explain this phenomenon. The household is a paradigmatic case of Schelling’s “mixed motive” game. Interests among members of the household are strongly aligned. Beblo (2001), for instance, in her work on bargaining over time allocation in the household, points out that forming a household saves members from transaction costs that arise in the usual processes of trading goods, advantages members in terms of information-sharing, improves efficiency in the consumption of public goods, and provides an insurance policy should one member of the household become sick or unemployed. For these sorts of reasons, traditional economic approaches to the household treated it as a single unit of interest (Gronau, 1973, 1976; Becker, 1981). But a wide swath of studies has since provided strong evidence that, in fact, different members of the household often have separate interests (Thomas, 1990, 1993, 1994; Hoddinott and Haddad, 1995; Udry, 1996; Doss, 1996). Lundberg et al. (1997), for example, in a landmark study observe that in a natural experiment where the British government changed a tax break in men’s paychecks to a direct payment to women, there were observable changes in spending—for example, purchases of women’s and children’s clothing increased whereas purchases of men’s clothing and tobacco decreased.⁴ (Okin (1989) makes a similar critique in philosophy, in response to theories of justice that treat the family as a univocal unit.)

Recognizing both the common and conflicting interests present in a household, economists have used bargaining games to model division of material resources and time in this domain. Some of this work has applied Nash’s axiomatic approach to household bargaining. Here the disagreement point can be interpreted as the payoff to individuals should they divorce (Manser and Brown, 1980; McElroy and Horney, 1981).⁵ Systematic differences in these payoffs can result from “extrahousehold environmental parameters” (McElroy, 1990)—factors like differences in social network support, legal structures, access to communal goods, social norms, education, work experience, ownership of assets, chances on the marriage market, and laws such as divorce and inheritance laws (Eswaran, 2014). Lundberg (2008) points out that extremely different expected disagreement points from divorce can result from traditional division of labor with women doing home and men market labor. This is because the latter leads to private goods (money) and is more relevant to single life.⁶ (Philosophers have attended to this sort of asymmetry in thinking about justice and morality. Goodin (1986) identifies symmetric ability to leave a relationship as a key factor in preventing exploitation, and Okin (1989) makes explicit how this requirement often fails in marriages.)

These models can explain systematic patterns in household bargaining in the following way. Earned income and the other social factors described above will determine the disagreement point for each couple. If women’s wages are lower, on average, than men’s wages, their disagreement point will tend to be lower and, as a result, they will be expected to receive less preferable outcomes in household bargaining scenarios. This can occur even in couples where partners work the same hours because these other social factors matter to the disagreement point.⁷

What these models do not explain are cross-national differences in household division of labor even when factors such as women’s wages are held constant (Treas and Drobnic, 2010). These features are arguably accounted for by norms that govern household division of labor. Fuwa (2004), for example, finds that gender norms impact household bargaining beyond what any individual monetary/power differences might explain. In countries with norms for high gender equality, women are better able to make use of their bargaining chips. Evolutionary models where behavior emerges at the group or society level provide simple, compelling explanations of the norm-like aspects of household bargaining inequities.

https://academic.oup.com/book/32356/chapter/268620787