We explored the division of parenthood in Chinese families with adolescents by identifying the parental involvement patterns in the data obtained from 786 pairs of parents. Division-of-parenthood patterns were created via factor mixture modeling using self-reported three dimensions of father and mother involvement. Three differential division-of-parenthood patterns were identified: (a) parent-cooperation pattern, where moderate and equivalent involvement existed between mothers and fathers; (b) mother-dominated pattern, where mother involvement was particularly greater than father involvement; and (c) father-dominated pattern, where father involvement (...) was particularly greater than mother involvement. Families were more likely to be in the mother- or the father-dominated pattern as their levels of positive coparenting behaviors increased. By contrast, as the levels of paternal conflict behavior increased, families were likely to be in the mother-dominated pattern. This study highlighted parents’ individual parenting role, the diverse division-of-parenthood patterns in the family, and the important role of coparenting behavior. (shrink)

While recent emphasis has been placed on transformations of gender in the public sphere, changes in gender relations between heterosexual couples in the domestic sphere have been less fully developed in the theoretical literature. The author presents evidence for change at various levels, from the discursive to the quantitative. She outlines a theoretical framework for the analysis of such change based on the “doing gender” and gender consciousness perspectives, readdressed in the light of the new emphasis on discourses of reflexivity (...) and intimacy. She argues for a conception of change that is slow and uneven, in which daily practices and interactions are linked to attitudes and discourse, perhaps over generations. (shrink)

Can feminists count on welfare states—or at least some aspects of these complex systems—as resources in the struggle for gender equality? Gender analysts of "welfare states" investigate this question and the broader set of issues around the mutually constitutive relationship between systems of social provision and regulation and gender. Feminist scholars have moved to bring the contingent practice of politics back into grounded fields of action and social change and away from the reification and abstractions that had come to dominate (...) models of politics focused on "big" structures and systems, including those focused on "welfare states." Conceptual innovations and reconceptualizations of foundational terms have been especially prominent in the comparative scholarship on welfare states, starting with gender, and including care, autonomy, citizenship, dependence, political agency, and equality. In contrast to other subfields of political science and sociology, gendered insights have to some extent been incorporated into mainstream comparative scholarship on welfare states. The arguments between feminists and mainstream scholars over the course of the last two decades have been productive, powering the development of key themes and concepts pioneered by gender scholars, including "defamilialization," the significance of unpaid care work in families and the difficulties of work-family "reconciliation," gendered welfare state institutions, the relation between fertility and women's employment, and the partisan correlates of different family and gender policy models. Yet the mainstream still resists the deeper implications of feminist work, and has difficulties assimilating concepts of care, gendered power, dependency, and interdependency. Thus, the agenda of gendering comparative welfare state studies remains unfinished. To develop an understanding of what might be needed to finish that agenda, I assess the gendered contributions to the analysis of modern systems of social provision, starting with the concept of gender itself then moving to studies of the gendered division of labor and of gendered political power. (shrink)

Previous research suggests that there are important gender disparities in the experience of leisure, but the issue of how mothers and fathers experience free time emotionally remains overlooked. The present study addressed this lacuna using the Experience Sampling Method and survey data from the 500 Family Study. Results showed that mothers and fathers spent the same amount of time on leisure activities. However, mothers had slightly less pure free time than fathers and were more likely to combine leisure with unpaid (...) work or spend time in leisure with children. Multilevel analyses showed that pure free time was associated with increased positive affect and engagement and decreased negative affect and stress, as was the combination of free time with unpaid work and personal care. These trends did not differ by gender. Adult leisure and free time with children were also beneficial to parents’ well-being. However, the relationship between free time with children and positive affect was stronger among fathers, whereas the association between adult leisure and engagement was stronger among mothers. These results suggest that mothers may feel more anxious about being criticized by others when engaging in leisure with their children, whereas spending time with adults alone may free them from the pressures of “good mothering.”. (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)

Descriptions of how people use time can tell us much about quality of life, social and economic well-being, and patterns of leisure, work, travel, and communication. Self-administered activity diaries are one of the main methods available for capturing data on time use. This paper discusses some of the methodological issues surrounding the use of self-administered activity diaries as a tool for capturing data on communication and travel activities. Its main concern is to highlight the lessons learnt from the use of (...) self-administered activity diaries as a supplementary method of data collection in a recent study. This study assessed whether different levels of access to, and use of, Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) enable different paces of life in different communities, and how this process might be contributing to social and spatial polarisation. The insights gained into how activity dairies can be successfully applied are relevant to research within any discipline where this method of data collection is being considered. (shrink)

In this paper we seek to understand the interplay between increasingly widely held concerns about the hegemony of industrialized agriculture and the emergence of counter-hegemonic activities, such as membership of community supported agriculture (CSA) initiatives. Informed by Blackshaw’s (Leisure, Abingdon, Routledge, 2010) work on “liquid leisure,” we offer a new leisure-based conceptualization of the tactics of counter-hegemony, arguing in the process that food politics offers a rich site for new, transitional identity formation. Using a case study of a well-established community (...) farm in southeast England, we demonstrate how the community members devote themselves to transient and inconsequential activities as a means of attempting to realize a larger self-related identity project. We also demonstrate how the seemingly close inter-personal bonds typical of CSA may not reflect the permanence accorded to them, with members able willingly to leave these communities once they can no longer progress their identity project. We conclude by arguing that our findings are emblematic of society in transition, with people moving well beyond the work/leisure activity into a world in which they embody the idea and the practice of being an active co-producer—in our case, of food. While recognizing that this does not necessarily mean that there is simple causality between practice and identity formation, we do argue that there is evidence of an increasing relationship between activity, time, and the performance of a new form of civil labor practice. (shrink)