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Household work: When gender ideologies and practices interact

Abstract Women have moved into the traditionally‐male domain of paid work at a faster rate than men have moved into the traditionally‐female domain of household work. Today, two‐parent families are faced with the dilemma of how to accomplish the work required to meet their family's need for both economic support and physical and psychological nurturance of their children. Drawing from literature on household work and data from a qualitative research study, this article examines how families divide the work required to sustain themselves. Ten families with preschool‐aged children participated in this study that used participant observation and intensive interviews in combination with a questionnaire designed to determine how household work was completed within each family. This article demonstrates how the parents’ gender ideologies interacted to create their specific gender (practices) strategies and struggles. Parents’ beliefs and values about who should do what and their rationales for how they divided the work in their family are explored. This study's findings also highlight two methodological considerations. First, questionnaire data frequently used within the literature to determine women's and men's participation in household work did not present the full picture of how household work was divided and, therefore, may be misleading. Second, although participant observation and intensive interviews were found to be more useful methods than the questionnaire, this study demonstrates that both of these qualitative methods were required to understand each family's division of household work. Reliance upon parents’ statements of beliefs and values about gender expectations for participation in household work without observations of their specific behaviours or vice versa would have resulted in an incomplete view of how these families divided the work required to sustain themselves.