Abstract
Drawing on data from a UK study conducted in 2014/2015, based on qualitative interviews with 25 working parent, heterosexual couples on their domestic division of labour, I argue that the interactive methodology of the ‘Household Portrait’ not only provides data on the distribution of household labour but also reveals gender differences in how domestic labour is conceptualised and measured. Disagreements and inconsistencies between couples over who ‘mostly’ does various tasks embody gendered perceptions of the meaning of doing domestic tasks and the appropriate temporal frame for evaluating individual contributions. Partners’ joking competition over their respective contributions highlight not just the normative expectations guiding what women and men feel they should do but also the criteria that they think should be used to measure their contributions.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 451-468 |
| Number of pages | 18 |
| Journal | Sociological research online |
| Volume | 26 |
| Issue number | 3 |
| Early online date | 2 Sept 2020 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 1 Sept 2021 |
Bibliographical note
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).Keywords
- domestic labour
- family conflict
- gender
- methodology
- normative expectations