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Striving for Equality in an Unequal World

If there is an iron law in the sociologies of gender and family, it is that women in heterosexual couples spend substantially more time on housework and childcare than their men counterparts. This pattern is consistent across time periods and across all countries where time use data are collected. Relatively recent estimates from the American Time Use Survey (ATUS), the most comprehensive study of time use in the United States, indicate that married mothers spend 18.3 hours on housework per week on average, compared to 9.5 hours per week for married fathers. In addition, married mothers spend an average of 13.7 hours per week on childcare duties, versus 7.2 hours per week for married fathers (Bianchi et al. 2012). Evidence suggests that these ‘‘normal’’ gender gaps grew considerably in the wake of COVID-19, as most workplaces and schools shifted online and working mothers assumed the responsibility of caring for and monitoring children during their work hours (Collins et al. 2021). Scholars have demonstrated that housework is divided along gendered lines because people have deeply gendered expectations about who does what at home. Earlier generations of social scientists posited that women tend to do more housework than men because they spend less time on paid work; so, naturally, women have more time available to spend on household chores (see, e.g., Coverman 1985). More recently, sociologists have eschewed this time availability perspective in favor of theories that take seriously the deeply gendered, and even essentialist, nature of housework (see, e.g., Davis and Greenstein 2009; Doan and Quadlin 2019; Quadlin and Doan 2018; West and Zimmerman 1987). By most accounts, the division of household labor is more gendered in households with children than without. Research shows that even among dual-earner couples who are relatively egalitarian, women take on substantially more unpaid labor after the birth of a first child, thus shifting the burden toward new mothers (Yavorsky, Kamp Dush, and Schoppe-Sullivan 2015). Despite the consistency of these findings across time and place, it is important to keep in mind that these are merely averages. That is, wives on average spend about twice as much time on housework and childcare as their husbands—but this does not mean that every heterosexual couple divides housework and childcare in such an unequal manner. Who are these couples that resist such gendered divisions of household labor? How do they consciously create equality between partners—especially when most other couples have decidedly unequal experiences at home? Such couples are the focus of Creating Equality at Home: How 25 Couples around the World Share Housework and Childcare, edited by Francine M. Deutsch and Ruth A. Gaunt. Rather than focus on average couples—in which wives spend double the amount of time on housework and childcare as their husbands—this book is centered on couples with children who have constructed a sense of equality in their households. Deutsch and Gaunt worked with authors in 22 countries worldwide to identify these equally sharing couples and interview them to understand their daily lives, with an emphasis on how they have constructed equality in the face of broader societal inequality. This is an extraordinary intellectual achievement (not to mention an extraordinary administrative achievement, coordinating this Creating Equality at Home: How 25 Couples around the World Share Housework and Childcare, edited by Francine M. Deutsch and Ruth A. Gaunt. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020. 408 pp. $24.99. ISBN: 97811087 08845. Review Essays 89