Elsevier

Women's Studies International Forum

Volume 68, May–June 2018, Pages 36-46
Women's Studies International Forum

The tension between gender equality and doing gender: Swedish couples' talk about the division of housework

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2018.01.010Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Gender equality can be thwarted by the process of doing gender.

  • Modern couples struggle with the tension between gender equality and doing gender.

  • Couples that profess to a gender equal sharing can still reproduce unequal sharing.

  • Gendered inequalities can be understood and explained as something other than a question of gender.

  • Couple interviews can be a powerful tool for analysis of housework.

Abstract

Sweden is considered as one of the most gender equal countries in the world and most Swedes claim to embrace gender equality. Yet, the majority of couples still organize their family lives according to traditional gendered patterns. This article aims to investigate how gender plays a role for how couples in Sweden talk about, articulate and frame their arguments regarding their division of housework. We identify three practices that act to support and reproduce a traditional gender order. These practices are: constructions of (un)suitability, placement of responsibility and comparison. Through these practices the couples' uneven division of housework is made into something other than a question of gender (in)equality, and change of the present order is made into a non-issue. We argue that the tension between striving for gender equality on the one hand and doing gender on the other, characterizes everyday interaction in modern couples. Recognizing this complexity is important for understanding the slow changes in gendered and gendering patterns and for the slow movement towards greater gender equality. The analysis brings the complex, interwoven and contradictory processes of doing gender to the fore.

Introduction

A large body of research has investigated the role of gender for the division of housework in couples. This article aims to contribute to this body of research by taking a look at how gender plays a role for how couples understand and explain their division of housework. In this paper we focus on how heterosexual couples in Sweden draw on gendered understandings (explicitly and implicitly) in how they talk about, articulate and frame their arguments regarding their division of housework. Our hope is that the results here will contribute to a deeper understanding of why couples share housework as they do, and ultimately, of why the move towards greater gender equality in couple relationships is so slow.

Many countries experienced a great increase in women's labor market participation and advances in other areas during the 1970s and 1980s. This development, often referred to as the gender revolution (Hochschild, 1989), affected mainly women who entered into male-dominated areas. However the trend leveled off in about 1990 and has therefore been referred to as stalled (England, 2010). This first half of this revolution was uneven and took place predominantly in the public spheres of politics, education and the labor market (Goldscheider, Bernhardt, & Lappegård, 2015). Women's entry into traditionally male spheres was not matched (at least to the same degree) by men's increased involvement in the domestic sphere (England, 2010), despite a slight increase in men's unpaid labor in the home (Hook, 2006). The result is that women still do more unpaid housework than men in the United States (Bianchi, Milkie, Sayer, & Robinson, 2000; Bianchi, Sayer, Milkie, & Robinson, 2012; Coltrane, 2000; Coltrane, 2010) and internationally (Sani, 2014; Treas & Drobnic, 2010). This is also true in Sweden (Boye & Evertsson, 2014; Statistics Sweden, 2016), despite Sweden's status as one of the most gender equal countries in the world (World Economic Forum, 2016). Goldscheider et al. (2015) suggest that the gender revolution has entered into a new phase and that we are currently in the middle of the second, familistic, half of the gender revolution, in which men will significantly increase their participation in childcare and unpaid domestic work. Given that research findings show that women still do more housework (and childcare) than their male partner, it is important to understand more about the factors that contribute to, as well as hinder, gender (in)equality in the home.

In order to further our understanding of the mechanisms behind the relatively slow progress towards gender equality in the home, qualitative studies are needed. These can help us better understand “the meanings that people attach to their division of labor patterns” (Lachance-Grzela & Bouchard, 2010, 778). They can also allow a stronger focus on participants' own perspectives, practices, definitions and understandings of gender (Coltrane, 2000; Davis & Greenstein, 2009). This qualitative study, we believe can help to fill in the gaps in our knowledge by focusing on the ways that couples' understand and discuss their division of housework in terms of gender, in a broad sense. In this article, we will try to show how gender, in both explicit and implicit ways, is important for how women and men in couples conceptualize and share housework.

The aim of this article is to analyze why the progress towards a less gender traditional division of labor is so slow. We do this by investigating how couples discuss their division of housework. We are interested in investigating the role that gender plays for the ways that couples understand, talk about and share housework. In the analysis, we identify and discuss three main practices that occur in couples' talk about the division of housework. We also discuss how these practices are connected to the process of doing gender in couples.

Section snippets

Gender and gender equality in a Swedish context

Since 1970s Sweden has had explicit policies aimed at increasing gender equality in the labor market as well as in the home and as a result, egalitarian attitudes towards gender are widespread and stable in Sweden (Bernhardt, Noack, & Lyngstad, 2008; Kaufman, Bernhardt, & Goldscheider, 2017; Lundqvist, 2011). Broad political consensus regarding the importance of gender equality, as well as a strong public discourse about gender equality in Sweden has existed for decades. A long-standing policy

Research on the division of housework

In this section we discuss research that tries to understand how heterosexual couples share housework, with a focus on the role of gender. Most studies on the division of housework discuss factors influencing this in terms of micro and macro level factors. Studies with a macro level perspective take as a point of departure the importance of the national and cultural context for people's behavior. Structural arrangements are seen as influencing individuals' values and expectations in life,

Couples' talk – some theoretical and methodological points of departure

In this article we take a close look at the verbal interaction between partners in couple interviews. Drawing on critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 2003), we analyze what happens when couples talk about and negotiate (in the sense of negotiating an obstacle course, see Stocks, 2007) their division of housework. During early coding of the interviews, one of the themes and tendencies we were most struck by was the different ways that an uneven and gender-traditional division of housework

Methods and data

In this article the authors revisit data from two separate, non-related, interview-based research projects that both included (among other things) the investigation of the gendered division of housework. In a conversation about their respective research projects that had ended a few years earlier, the authors of this article discovered that the two research projects had a similar aim, used similar methods and showed similar tendencies regarding couples' ways of talking about housework. We

What couples do when they talk about housework - three practices

The starting point for our analysis of how couples talk about housework and what role gender plays, is an extended excerpt from one couple interview. We use this rather unorthodox method because this one long quote contains the three practices that we identified in the course of our analysis, and that we will discuss below. We refer back to this excerpt throughout the analysis. The excerpt serves as an empirical backbone for our analysis, and serves to illustrate the practices we discuss.

Concluding discussion

The aim of this article was to analyze why the progress towards a less gender traditional division of labor is so slow by investigating how couples discuss their division of housework. We were interested in understanding why a traditional division of housework continues and the role that gender plays in how it is reproduced. We identified and discussed three practices found in the couple interviews: constructions of (un)suitability, placement of responsibility and comparison. We found that in

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