DOCSLIB.ORG

Changes in Partners' Relative Incomes and the Gender Revolution

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Changes in Partners' Relative Incomes and the Gender Revolution Changes in Partners' Relative Incomes and the Gender Revolution Agnese Vitali University of Southampton and ESRC Centre for Population Change [email protected] Extended abstract prepared for the Population Association of America Annual Meeting 2017 Aim This paper provides an overview of trends in couples’ relative incomes between the 1980s until the 2010s across 15 OECD countries. Theoretical framework and hypotheses The multiple equilibrium and the two-phase gender revolution theories (Arpino et al., 2015, Esping-Andersen and Billari, 2015, Goldscheider et al., 2015) predict that, once gender equality in all spheres of life is reached, a new model of the family will become widespread, with higher fertility and more stable unions. During the different phases of the gender revolution, partners’ relative incomes change adapting to the new roles of women and men (Bianchi et al. 1999; Esping-Andersen 2009; England 2010; Goldin 2006). In a gender-egalitarian society, such changes will be fuelled by the eradication of those structural barriers which today interfere with the possibility of women and men to earn an equal pay for an equal job such as gender pay gaps, motherhood wage penalties, lack of parental leave provision for men, etc. (OECD 2016). This paper asks how will the distribution of relative incomes look like in the gender-egalitarian equilibrium? We could envisage that, in equilibrium, men and women will be engaging in both market-work activities and in caring responsibility equally, i.e. for an equal amount of time and with an equal pay. It would be however unrealistic to expect that each partner will contribute exactly 50% of the couple’s incomes. In fact, men and women in a gender-egalitarian partnership need not share equally all caring responsibility, nor need they be expected to work an exact amount of hours throughout the length of their relationship. We could envisage that, in a gender-egalitarian equilibrium, partners are flexible and exchangeable into both breadwinning and caring responsibilities (Gerson, 2010). They may take turns and engage more in work responsibilities at particular stages of their (or their partners’) life course and more in caring responsibilities in other stages. Taking turns may be the result of individual preferences e.g. driven by the will to experiment a particular career, or may be imposed by structural characteristics of the labour market. Under this scenario, we shall find that the distribution of partners’ relative incomes has shifted over time from being positively skewed (i.e. with the majority of couples abiding to the male-breadwinner model) during the 1980s, to becoming more symmetrical (i.e. with the majority of partners being equal earners). In equilibrium, we expect the share of the income provided by the woman to resemble a bell-shape distribution with a mean equal to 50%, i.e. we expect the arrangement whereby partners contribute equally to the household income to be most frequent. The symmetry of the distribution means that the expected frequency of any deviation from equality of incomes is non-gendered: the share of couples where the woman contributes x% of the couples’ incomes to be equal to the share of couples where she contributes (100–x)%. Also, in equilibrium, we expect the share of male-breadwinner couples to be the same as the share of female-breadwinner couples. Furthermore, we expect couples with a perfect specialization of gender roles at a given point in time to be more numerous than dual-earner couples with women or men. In other words, we expect the distribution of couples’ relative incomes to have three peaks: one corresponding to equality of earnings among partners, and the other two corresponding to the male and the female-breadwinner couples. Such scenario is represented in Figure 1. We shall also expect the above- mentioned changes to be more pronounced in those countries which are closer to completing the gender 1 revolution, namely the Scandinavian countries, and more modest in those countries where the revolution is still in its infant phase, such as the Southern European, German-speaking and Eastern-European countries. The scenario presented in Figure 1 implicitly hypothesises that the majority of couples will be characterized by a certain degree of homogamy among partners in terms of e.g. education, occupation and age (hence work experience). Such an assumption seems reasonable in light of recent findings on assortative mating in Europe and North America which documented a substantial increase in couples’ educational homogamy (Grow and Van Bavel 2015). Partners’ relative incomes were found to be affected by the shift in the educational composition of couples: the share of equal earners as well as female breadwinners has been increasing with the increasing educational attainment of women (Klesment and Van Bavel 2017; Esteve et al. 2016). However, age hypergamy still prevails (England and McClintock 2009). Figure 1: Expected distribution of couples’ relative incomes in gender-egalitarian equilibrium Data This contribution makes use of data form the Luxembourg Income Study Database (LIS) which provides cross- sectional micro-level household data on income and socio-demographic information for several OECD countries. This paper focuses on 15 OECD countries for which LIS provides data spanning between the late1980s and the 2010s: Austria, Australia, Denmark, Finland, Germany (West), Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom and United States. LIS was not expressively designed to compare countries instead it harmonizes existing national datasets. It follows that the reference period is not the same across all samples. The sample is constituted of currently co-residing heterosexual couples where partners are aged between 25 and 54 years old (prime earning age), none of the partners is disabled, in education, or retired and such that the couples’ combined labour income is not equal to zero. Preliminary Results Figure 2 reports the distribution of the woman’s contribution to the couple income for selected countries. This distribution for the latest years is conform to what found for the 2010s by (Bertrand et al. (2015), Klesment and Van Bavel (2015)) using the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), and the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC), respectively. The greatest change in terms of couples’ relative incomes between the late 1980s and the early 2010s is the decline of the male-breadwinner couple: the share of women who do not contribute at all to the couple’s income declined substantially in most countries. In Sweden the share of women with no income was as low as 6% already in 1987 and did not change up to 2013. Today, the share of women with a zero income still varies remarkably across countries, ranging from 6% and 8% in Sweden and Norway, respectively, up to 39% in Italy. Between the late 1980s and the 2010s women’s contribution to the couples’ income increased in all countries. However, the increase has been uneven and concentrated in the left tail of the relative incomes’ distribution. In other words, it is the share of couples where women contribute 50% or less that increased the most since the 1980s. The share of couples where women earn between 50% and 70% of the couples’ incomes has also increased, but to a lesser extent. The highest increases in the share of couples with women as main earners (i.e. earning more than 50% of the couple’s incomes) are found in Norway, United Kingdom, and Canada. Remarkably, there is no or very little change over time in the share of couples where women earn between 71% and 99% or more of their household income. Interestingly, in most countries, the share of female-breadwinner couples (i.e. couples where the woman earns 100% of the couples’ incomes) increased substantially between 2005 and 2013 in those countries especially affected by the 2008 economic crisis, passing from 2.52% to 10.23% in Spain and from 1.69% to 4.49% in Italy. Such trend is observed also during the late 1980s and the early-1990s, i.e. during the economic downturn which followed the 2 1987 Black Monday and caused unemployment rates to soar, especially in the male-dominated job sectors. We can interpret the high share of female-breadwinner couples in such years as a result of the increased unemployment for men during times of economic crisis (Vitali and Arpino 2016). Conclusions The distribution of the couples’ relative incomes has become, during the past forty years, more symmetrical and shifted towards the right, consistently with the gender revolution theory. The distribution of relative incomes appears to be more symmetrical in Denmark, Sweden and Norway than elsewhere. In all Scandinavian countries, the mean of the distribution is however still below the 50% that we would predict in a gender-egalitarian equilibrium. Also, the share of male-breadwinner couples is still higher than the share of female-breadwinner couples, although such differences have been declining over time. The prevalence of female-breadwinner couples, instead, is not higher in Scandinavian countries, as the gender revolution theory would predict. The existence of female-breadwinners seems to be linked to the business cycle more than to gender equality. The economic crisis has recently boosted the increase in dual-earners and female-breadwinner couples in Southern- European countries and might have accelerated the diffusion of gender-egalitarian attitudes, at least among certain population strata. The final version of the paper will include other OECD countries for which data are available and will include figures of couples’ relative incomes by the partners’ socio-demographic characteristics e.g. education, birth cohort, presence of children. The theoretical framework will incorporate expectations on such individual characteristics. References Arpino, B., Esping-Andersen, G.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • LIS Working Paper Series
    LIS Working Paper Series No. 766 Income, Familialism and Women’s Economic Independence Kaitlin Alper June 2019 Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), asbl Income, Familialism and Women’s Economic Independence Income, Familialism and Women’s Economic Independence Kaitlin Alper Abstract This paper explores the dynamics of women’s economic independence at the individual household level and its relationship to country-level income distributions. I posit a nega- tive relationship between income and women’s economic independence. Using detailed household-level data from the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) across thirteen advanced capitalist democracies, I show that women at upper ends of the income distribution con- sistently have less within-household economic independence than do their counterparts at the bottom of the distribution. I then show that this negative relationship is sensitive to political characteristics at the country level. In countries whose policies support a male breadwinner model, women’s economic independence is lower across the board than in other types of countries; in gender egalitarian countries, it is higher. Family policies do not, however, have a significant impact on the income stratification of women’s eco- nomic independence. These results suggest that social policy characteristics and labor market dynamics have important implications for gender equity both within and between households. 1 1 Introduction Over the past three decades, income inequality has been increasing throughout the advanced capitalist world (Piketty, 2014). For women, gendered income inequality in partic- ular has significant sociological implications, including unequal division of household labor and increased likelihood of abuse within relationships (Kalmuss and Straus, 1982; Brines, 1994; Macmillan and Gartner, 1999; Morris, 1990).
    [Show full text]
  • Male Breadwinning Revisited: How Specialisation, Gender Role Attitudes and Work Characteristics Affect Overwork and Underwork in Europe
    Male breadwinning revisited: how specialisation, gender role attitudes and work characteristics affect overwork and underwork in Europe. Shireen Kanji and Robin Samuel. Published in Sociology Published online August 2015 http://soc.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/08/25/0038038515596895.full.pdf We examine how male breadwinning and fatherhood relate to men’s overwork and underwork in western Europe. Male breadwinners should be less likely to experience overwork than other men, particularly when they have children, if specialising in paid work suits them. However, multinomial logistic regression analysis of the European Social Survey data from 2010 (n=4662) challenges this position: male breadwinners, with and without children, want to work fewer than their actual hours, making visible one of the downsides of specialisation. Male breadwinners wanting to work fewer hours is specifically related to the job interfering with family life, as revealed by a comparison of the average marginal effects of variables across models. Work-life interference has an effect over and beyond the separate effects of work characteristics and family structure, showing the salience of the way work and life articulate. Keywords: working hours, hours constraints, hours mismatch, male breadwinners, work-life conflict, overwork, underwork, fatherhood 1 2 Shireen Kanji and Robin Samuel 1 Centre for Sustainable Work and Employment Futures and School of Management, University of Leicester, [email protected] 1 2 Institute of Sociology, University of Bern and Social Research and Methodology Chair, University of Basel 2 INTRODUCTION More an ideal than reality, the male breadwinner model still profoundly impacts how gender organises societies. Male breadwinning forms the bedrock of systems of separate spheres in which men engage in paid work and women in unpaid work.
    [Show full text]
  • Closing the Gender Pay
    Closing the gender pay gap: A review of the issues, policy mechanisms and international evidence Closing the gender pay gap: A review of issues, policy mechanisms and international evidence Gender, Equality and Diversity ILO Branch CLOSING THE GENDER PAY GAP: A REVIEW OF THE ISSUES, POLICY MECHANISMS AND INTERNATIONAL EVIDENCE JILL RUBERY* AND ARISTEA KOUKIADAKI** *Professor, Alliance Manchester Business School, University of Manchester **Senior Lecturer, University of Manchester’s School of Law International Labour Office • Geneva Copyright © International Labour Organization 2016 First published (2016) Publications of the International Labour Office enjoy copyright under Protocol 2 of the Universal Copyright Convention. Nevertheless, short excerpts from them may be reproduced without authorization, on condition that the source is indicated. For rights of reproduction or translation, application should be made to ILO Publications (Rights and Licensing), International Labour Office, CH-1211 Geneva 22, Switzerland, or by email: [email protected]. The International Labour Office welcomes such applications. Libraries, institutions and other users registered with a reproduction rights organization may make copies in accordance with the licences issued to them for this purpose. Visit www.ifrro.org to find the reproduction rights organization in your country. Rubery, Jill; Koukiadaki, Aristea. Closing the gender pay gap: a review of the issues, policy mechanisms and international evidence / Jill Rubery, Aristea Koukiadaki; International Labour
    [Show full text]
  • The Decline of the Male Breadwinner Model: Implications for Work and Care
    JANE LEWIS Downloaded from The Decline of the Male Breadwinner Model: http://sp.oxfordjournals.org/ Implications for Work and Care at Northwestern University Library, Serials Department on March 10, 2015 Modern welfare systems have always been constructed around the relationship between social provision and paid work; it is this that has in large measure distinguished them from needs-based and universal, but punitively deterrent, poor law systems. Governments have always been concerned about the conditions for providing wel- fare,1 that is, the nature of entitlements in the language of many pol- icy analysts, but more a matter of conditionality in the mind of gov- ernment. There has been a long-standing firm conviction too that wages are the best form of welfare. In the United Kingdom, almost 100 years ago the Labour party fought for a legislative proposal called the Right to Work Bill more fiercely than it did for pensions, while it was not at all keen on the new idea of social insurance be- cause trade unions feared state intrusion into the territory of mutual- ity. What was at stake of course was the fight for the old-style labor contract, to which social insurance was successfully joined in all western European countries, and which is now under profound re- view (Supiot 1999). The settlement at the heart of the modern wel- fare state was that between capital and labor. But as feminists have long argued (Wilson 1977; Land 1980; Lewis 1992) and as the main- stream social policy and sociology literature (e.g., Esping-Andersen 1999; Crouch 1999) has recently begun to recognize, there was a second key settlement between men and women.
    [Show full text]
  • Ireland's Social Welfare System
    1 Ireland’s Social Welfare System: Gender, Family and Class Background Paper (151/4) April 2021 2 Ireland’s Social Welfare System: Gender, Family and Class Background Paper (151/4) Dr Anne Marie McGauran April 2021 This background paper provides additional empirical and analytical material on the issues discussed in the main Council report No.151, The Future of the Irish Welfare State. This paper was agreed by the Council in April 2019. A list of the full set of NESC publications is available at www.nesc.ie i Table of Contents Executive summary Error! Bookmark not defined. 1.1 Introduction 12 1.2 The Male Breadwinner Model and the Irish Welfare System 13 1.3 Outcomes of the Ways in Which the Social Welfare System is Gendered 31 1.4 Calls for Change, and Changes Made 42 1.5 Elements of the Breadwinner Structure Still Underlie the Social Welfare System 46 1.6 What Options Could be Developed in Future? 50 Appendices 58 Bibliography 63 List of Figures Figure 1: Length of adequately compensated postnatal maternity, paternity and parental leave in the EU (in weeks) 27 Figure 2: Proportion (%) of couples with at least one child aged 0-14b where both partners work full-time and where neither partner works, for couples with a given joint level of education 37 Figure 3: Proportion (%) of couples with at least one child where neither partner works 37 List of Tables Table 1: Employment rates of mothers in Ireland and the EU, by education level, 2014 (%) 33 Table 2: Typical weekly working hours of partnered mothers by education level, Ireland, 2014
    [Show full text]
  • Feminist Arguments in Favour of Welfare and Basic Income in Denmark
    9th International Congress Geneva, September 12th-14th Feminist Arguments in Favour of Welfare and Basic Income in Denmark Erik Christensen* DRAFT, SEPTEMBER 2002. NOT TO BE QUOTED WITHOUT PERMISSION OF THE AUTHOR(S). The views expressed in this paper are those of the author(s), and do not necessarily represent the views of BIEN or BIEN-Suisse. *Department of Economics, Politics and Public Administration, Aalborg University, Fibigerstraede 1, DK- 9220 Aalborg Ø, Denmark, e-mail: [email protected]. Contents 1. Introduction.................................................................................................................. 1 2. Towards a new breadwinner model – but which one? ................................................. 3 3. The Danish debate on leave schemes and equality between work and care ................ 5 4. Deconstructing some gender political dilemmas ......................................................... 7 4.1 Equality/difference............................................................................................. 7 4.2 Commodification/decommodification ................................................................ 10 4.3 Dependence/independence................................................................................. 12 5. Nancy Fraser’s redefinition of and solution to the gender political dilemmas in the welfare state .................................................................................................................. 13 5.1 Two ideal types: “The universal breadwinner model”
    [Show full text]
  • A Socio-Structural Perspective on Family Model Preferences, Gender Roles and Work–Family Attitudes in Spain
    social sciences $€ £ ¥ Article A Socio-Structural Perspective on Family Model Preferences, Gender Roles and Work–Family Attitudes in Spain Almudena Moreno-Mínguez 1 , Marta Ortega-Gaspar 2,* and Carlos Gamero-Burón 3 1 Department of Sociology and Social Work, University of Valladolid, 40005 Valladolid, Spain; [email protected] 2 Department of Constitutional Law and Sociology, University of Málaga, 29071 Málaga, Spain 3 Department of Statistic and Econometry, University of Málaga, 29071 Málaga, Spain; [email protected] * Correspondence: [email protected] Received: 11 September 2018; Accepted: 20 December 2018; Published: 25 December 2018 Abstract: Since the early 1990s, the diversity of work–family arrangement models has increased in Spain. It is difficult to understand this phenomenon without attending to the Spanish population’s preferences for such models. This article analyses the attitudes towards gender roles, and family model preferences within a normative and socio-structural framework. Using data from the International Social Survey Programme 2012, we developed descriptive and explanatory analyses. The findings reveal contradictions between attitudes towards the mother’s and father’s work intensity and gender roles that seem to be resolved through preferences for a “hybrid” or “adaptive” family model. We also identified the determinants of family model preferences for both men and women. The results show that gender plays a significant role in explaining preferences (women are less likely than men to prefer the male-breadwinner family model) and that socio-structural factors such as age, education level, immigrant condition, religious status and social class influence the preferences of men and women differently. Ultimately, these results contrast with Hakim’s Preference Theory, which emphasises individuals’ choices over socio-structural factors as determinants of family models, and align with Crompton’s and Pfau-Effinger’s theories.
    [Show full text]
  • Breadwinning? Working Mothers and the New Face of Family Support
    REPORT WHO’S BREADWINNING? WORKING MOTHERS AND THE NEW FACE OF FAMILY SUPPORT Dalia Ben-Galim and Spencer Thompson August 2013 © IPPR 2013 Institute for Public Policy Research ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS Dalia Ben-Galim is associate director for families and work at IPPR. Spencer Thompson is an economic analyst at IPPR. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The authors would like to thank Chris Sherwood and Patrick Sholl at Relate for their input, advice and support. Thanks to Graeme Cooke, Tony Dolphin, Kayte Lawton and Nick Pearce at IPPR, and to Heather Boushey, chief economist at the Center for American Progress and visiting fellow at IPPR. This research has been generously supported by Relate. ABOUT IPPR ABOUT ‘THE CONDITION OF BRITAIN’ IPPR, the Institute for Public Policy Research, is the UK’s leading In the early 1990s, IPPR ran the Commission on Social Justice, progressive thinktank. We are an independent charitable which redefined the mainstream political response to core social organisation with more than 40 staff members, paid interns and policy questions. Now IPPR has launched a new programme visiting fellows. Our main office is in London, with IPPR North, called ‘The Condition of Britain’, with similar scope and ambition. IPPR’s dedicated thinktank for the North of England, operating This major work focuses on the resilience and resources in British out of offices in Newcastle and Manchester. society, but also the pressures faced by individuals and The purpose of our work is to assist all those who want to create a neighbourhoods. It considers how to harness the state, market society where every citizen lives a decent and fulfilled life, in and community to advance core social goals.
    [Show full text]
  • The New Roles of Men and Women and Implications for Families and Societies: Summary Report of Key Findings for WP3
    71 (2017) Changing families and sustainable societies: Policy contexts and diversity over the life course and across generations The new roles of men and women and implications for families and societies: Summary report of key findings for WP3 Livia Sz. Oláh, Rudolf Richter and Irena E. Kotowska © Copyright is held by the author(s). A project funded by European Union's Seventh Framework Programme under grant agreement no. 320116 The new roles of men and women and implications for families and societies: Summary report of key findings for WP3 Livia Sz. Oláh, Rudolf Richter and Irena E. Kotowska with extensive contribution from Caroline Berghammer, Laura Bernardi, Katarina Boye, Yolien De Hauw, Annalisa Donno, Marie Evertsson, Susanne Fahlén, Theresa Fibich, Doris Hanappi, Ursula Henz, Birgit Jentsch, Karin Jurczyk, Martin Klesment, Anna Matysiak, Cornelia Muresan, Natalie Nitsche, Francesca Piazza, Allan Puur, Leen Rahnu, Irene Rieder, Luule Sakkeus, Julia Salier, Cornelia Schadler, Michaela Schier, Eva-Maria Schmidt, Marta Styrc, Judit Takács, Maria Letizia Tanturri, Valentina Tocchioni, Isabel Valarino, Jan Van Bavel, Daniele Vignoli, Sabine Walper and Ulrike Zartler Abstract: This report summarizes the main results produced in Work package 3 on “The new roles of men and women and implications for families and societies”. The general objective of the work package was to address the complex interplay between the new roles of women and men and the diversity of family life courses in contemporary Europe. Moreover, the research aimed to shed more light on the impact of different policy contexts on new constructions of gender in doing family. To achieve the general objective, four specific objectives were laid out: i) to study women’s new role and implications for family dynamics with respect of both women and men; ii) to study the gendered transition to parenthood; iii) to study new gender roles in doing families, and iv) to study coping strategies in family and work reconciliation under conditions of uncertainty and precariousness.
    [Show full text]
  • Socio-Historical Paths of the Male Breadwinner Model – an Explanation of Cross-National Differences1
    The British Journal of Sociology 2004 Volume 55 Issue 3 Socio-historical paths of the male breadwinner model – an explanation of cross-national differences1 Birgit Pfau-Effinger Abstract It is often assumed that in the historical transformation to modern industrial society, the integration of women into the economy occurred everywhere as a three-phase process: in pre-modern societies, the extensive integration of women into societal production; then, their wide exclusion with the shift to industrial society; and finally, their re-integration into paid work during the further course of modernization. Results from the author’s own international comparative study of the historical development of the family and the economic integration of women have shown that this was decidedly not the case even for western Europe. Hence the question arises: why is there such historical variation in the devel- opment and importance of the housewife model of the male breadwinner family? In the article, an explanation is presented. It is argued that the historical devel- opment of the urban bourgeoisie was especially significant for the historical destiny of this cultural model: the social and political strength of the urban bour- geoisie had central societal importance in the imposition of the housewife model of the male breadwinner family as the dominant family form in a given society. In this, it is necessary to distinguish between the imposition of the breadwinner mar- riage at the cultural level on the one hand, and at the level of social practice in the family on the other. Keywords: Male breadwinner model; comparative family research; classification family models; socio-historical family research; historical variation of gender arrangements; urban bourgeoisie 1.
    [Show full text]
  • Why Do Occupations Dominated by Women Pay Less?
    Erschienen in: Work, Employment & Society ; 30 (2016), 5. - S. 802-820 https://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0950017015624402 Why do occupations dominated by women pay less? How ‘female-typical’ work tasks and working- time arrangements affect the gender wage gap among higher education graduates Kathrin Leuze Susanne Strauß Abstract Even though women today constitute the majority of higher education graduates, they still earn considerably less than their male counterparts. Previous research demonstrates that occupational sex segregation is important for understanding the gender wage gap, since occupations dominated by women pay less; yet less is known about why this is the case. This article explores two possible mechanisms: the devaluation of ‘female-typical’ work tasks and working-time arrangements. Hypotheses are tested by applying OLS regression and Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition analyses to the log hourly wages of a representative sample of German higher education graduates from 2001. Results confirm that occupational overtime increases and occupational part-time work decreases wages, indicating that occupations dominated by women pay less due to their ‘female- typical’ working-time arrangements. However, inconsistent with the devaluation thesis, tasks like teaching/educating increase wages for women, too, which speaks against a general lower value of ‘female-typical’ tasks, at least among the highly qualified. Keywords gender wage gap, Germany, higher education, occupational sex segregation, working time, work tasks Konstanzer Online-Publikations-System (KOPS) URL: http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bsz:352-0-321879 803 Introduction Although women’s participation in higher education and their labour market involvement have dramatically increased over recent decades, a variety of labour market inequalities between men and women remain.
    [Show full text]
  • Japan Labor Review Volume 13, Number 3, Summer 2016
    Female Labor Participation and the Sexual Division of Labor: A Consideration on the Persistent Male-Breadwinner Model* Junya Tsutsui Ritsumeikan University In Japan, the female labor participation rate has been rising since the 1980s, but there has still been no great change in the division of housework between men and women in the home. To make sense of this puzzle, this paper will ar- gue that the sexual division of labor has basically been maintained. In terms of paid work, the increased employment rate of Japanese women is not neces- sarily the result of policy-based support; rather, it can be attributed to factors such as continued employment due to a growing tendency to stay unmarried, and an increase in non-regular employment among married women. The rigid- ity of working styles is hindering women’s participation in regular employ- ment. In terms of unpaid work in the home, meanwhile, the husband’s house- work has not replaced the wife’s housework, and this is obstructing women’s commitment to their work. To weaken the persistent sexual division of labor and break through the barriers between women and employment, we will not only need to change systems of childcare leave and other family support; in- formal codes of behavior connected with the ideal image of working styles and the family will also need to be addressed. I. Social Change Involving Women and the Position of the Sexual Division of Labor Assuming that the distribution of paid work in the labor market and unpaid work in the home are linked to some extent, it would be natural to think that if one of them changed, the other would change as well.
    [Show full text]