Gender differences in children’s and adults’ time use are well documented, but few have examined the intervening period—young adulthood. Because many Americans navigate higher education in young adulthood, college time use provides insight into how gendered behaviors evolve during this critical life stage. Using three years of time use data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Freshmen and latent transition analysis, I examine gender differences in time use within and across the college years for those in selective institutions. Among students (...) whose time use is consistent throughout college, I find that women exhibit academically-oriented time use more often, and men exhibit socially oriented time use more often. However, many men transition from social time use at the beginning of college to academic time use toward the end—to the extent that gender gaps in academic time use converge by the third year. I argue that men and women construct distinct college pathways, and that men, in particular, must reroute their time use to accommodate gendered expectations for the transition to adulthood. (shrink)

Role distribution is a central issue for parents in the transition to parenthood, but little is known about the motivations in fathers to assume a specific role. Differences in work-family balance in each parent may be motivated by an individual choice mutually shared by both partners; however, in many couples, the parents may feel forced to adopt a traditional role distribution, either for financial reasons, or to comply with social expectations about what men and women should do when they are (...) parents. This feeling of being socially constrained to adopt a role distribution that is not congruent with intrinsic motivations can generate dissatisfaction and may jeopardize the development of the interparental relationship. Coparenting refers to the emotional and instrumental support parents bring to each other in their parental tasks. It has been shown to be central in family functioning and a powerful predictor of children’s emotional and cognitive development. In this study, we aimed to assess the extent to which different motivations for role distribution in fathers are predictive of the quality of the coparental relationship. A convenience sample of 144 fathers from the French-speaking part of Switzerland completed online questionnaires about their motivations, coparental relationship, and sociodemographic characteristics. Results showed that the reasons for role distribution were mainly economical, practical, and in order to meet personal expectations. Multivariate general linear modeling showed that role distribution that is constrained to meet social expectations and age were predictive of a less cohesive coparental relationship, whereas a deliberate choice in role distribution was linked to a more cohesive coparental relationship. (shrink)

This study adds to a small but growing literature that situates sleep within gendered work— family responsibilities. We conducted interviews with 25 heterosexual dual-earner working-class couples with children, most of whom had one partner who worked at night. A few men suffered disrupted sleep because of their commitment to being a coparent to their children, but for most their provider status gave them rights to longer and more continuous sleep. By contrast, as they were the primary caregiver during sentient hours, (...) women’s sleep was curtailed and interrupted by responding to the needs of family members at night and at the beginning of each day, and this was true for women who worked nights as well as days. Furthermore, in struggling to meet their daily employment and familial obligations while tired and sleepy, women further stressed their bodies in ways that can cause cumulative sleep debt. This article demonstrates that sleep deficits are another manifestation of gender inequality, with important implications for long-term health and well-being. (shrink)

Drawing on findings from an original national survey experiment, we unpack Americans’ views on the employment of mothers and fathers with young children. This study provides a fuller account of contemporary attitudes than is available from surveys such as the General Social Survey. After seeing vignettes that vary the circumstances in which married mothers, single mothers, and married fathers make decisions about paid work and caregiving, the respondents’ views swing from strong support to deep skepticism about a parent’s work participation, (...) depending on the parent’s specific job conditions and family circumstances. When a mother, whether married or single, is satisfied with her job and her family depends on her income, respondents overwhelmingly support the option to work. Conversely, when a father is dissatisfied with his job and the family does not depend on his income, respondents generally support the option to stay home. These findings provide insight regarding the “gender stall” thesis by showing that Americans’ views depend heavily on the circumstances they believe parents are facing. This more nuanced view highlights the importance of social context in the allocation of paid work and caregiving for both mothers and fathers. (shrink)

Increasingly, both mothers and fathers are expected to play an equal role in child rearing. Nonetheless, we know little about how child care arrangements affect couples’ sexual intimacy and relationship quality. Research has focused on the effect of the division of paid labor and housework on couples’ relationships, finding that egalitarianism is problematic for sexual intimacy, relationship quality, and relationship stability. These findings, however, come almost universally from studies utilizing decades-old data that fail to examine the division of child care. (...) In this study, we update this work by utilizing data from the 2006 Marital and Relationship Study to examine how the division of child care affects the relationship quality and sexual intimacy of heterosexual couples in the United States. Results indicate that men’s performance of child care is generally associated with more satisfaction with the division of child care, more satisfying sexual relationships, and higher quality relationships. Importantly, we find that egalitarian child care arrangements have positive consequences for both men and women. These findings contribute to a growing body of research that challenges the costs of egalitarianism and indicates instead that egalitarianism is associated with higher quality, more intimate relationships than gender traditional arrangements. (shrink)

How does place structure the gendered division of household labor? Because people’s living spaces and lifestyles differ dramatically across urban, suburban, and rural areas, it follows that time spent on household chores may vary across places. In cities, for example, many households do not have vehicles or lawns, and housing units tend to be relatively small. Urban men’s and women’s time use therefore provides insight into how partners contribute to household chores when there is less structural demand for the types (...) of tasks they typically do. We examine these dynamics using data on heterosexual married individuals from the American Time Use Survey combined with the Current Population Survey. We find that urban men spend relatively little time on male-typed chores, but they spend the same amount of time on female-typed chores as their suburban and rural counterparts. This pattern suggests that urban men do not “step up” their involvement in female-typed tasks even though they contribute little in the way of other housework. In contrast, urbanicity rarely predicts women’s time use, implying that women spend considerable time on household chores regardless of where they live. Implications for research on gender and housework are discussed. (shrink)

While public health researchers stress the importance of home-cooked meals, feminist scholars investigate inequalities in family cooking, including why women still cook much more than men. Key to understanding these inequalities is attention to how people learn to cook, a relatively understudied topic by social scientists. To address this gap, this study employs the concept of cultural schemas. Drawing from qualitative interviews and observations of 34 primary cooks in families, I identify the ubiquity of a “cooking by our mother’s side” (...) schema. This schema privileges culinary knowledge acquired during childhood through the social reproductive work of mothers. I argue, first, that this schema reproduces gendered inequalities over generations by reinforcing women as primary transmitters of cooking knowledge. Second, it presents an overly uniform picture of food learning that obscures diversity, especially by overemphasizing the importance of childhood and masking the learning that occurs later in life. Identifying and analyzing this schema offers opportunities to reconsider predominant approaches to food learning to challenge gendered inequalities in domestic foodwork. (shrink)

This paper draws on data from the most recent Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) Time Use Survey (TUS) (over 4,000 randomly selected households) to tease out the dimensions of the ‘second shift’. Predictions that as women entered the paid workforce men would contribute more to household labour have largely failed to eventuate. This underpins the view that women are working a second shift because they are shouldering a dual burden of paid and unpaid work. However, time use research seems to (...) show that when both paid and unpaid work is counted, male and female workloads are in total very similar. This has led to suggestions that a literal second shift is a myth; that it exists in the sense that women do more domestic work than men, but not in the sense that they work longer hours in total. Using a more accurate and telling measure of workload than previous research (paid and unpaid labour including multitasked activities), this paper explores the second shift and how it relates to family configuration, ethnicity and indicators of class and socioeconomic standing. It finds a clear disparity between the total workloads of mothers and fathers, much of which consists of simultaneous (secondary) activity, and some demographic differences in female (but not male) total workloads. It concludes that the view that the second shift is a myth is only sustainable by averaging social groups very broadly and by excluding multitasking from the measurement of total work activity. (shrink)

While popular cultural representations portray the “new father” of the past two decades as more involved, more nurturing, and capable of coparenting, many argue that actual fathering conduct has not kept pace. Others, however, question the extent to which the culture of fatherhood does indeed support involved fathering and, if so, what this involvement entails. This study aims to contribute to the exploration of the culture of fatherhood through an analysis of a yearlong Canadian newspaper series dedicated to family issues. (...) Findings suggest that through representations of parental guilt, parental responsibility, work—family balance issues, and hegemonic masculinity, mothers continue to be positioned as primary parents. Support for father involvement, to the extent that it exists, occurs within the framework of fathers as part-time, secondary parents whose relationship with children remains less important than mothers'. (shrink)