Couples Flashcards
What is the Domestic Division of Labour?
The split of work between women and men within the household.
What are the typical roles of women and men within the Domestic Division of Labour theory?
Women generally take the responsibility of child-rearing.
Men are typically the breadwinners and earn money at the workplace to provide for their families.
Sociologists FOR the Domestic Division of Labour
- Durkheim argues that the Domestic Division of Labour benefits society by increasing a person’s assets and reproductive qualities.
- As people become more concentrated, tons grow, and so does the amount of efficiency.
- Increasingly, labour is becoming more divided, and jobs are becoming more specialised.
What did Durkheim say about the Domestic Division of Labour?
- ‘The Division of Labour is directly proportional to the dynamic or moral density of society’.
A combination of the concentration of people and the amount of socialisation of a group.
Sociologists AGAINST the Domestic Division of Labour
- Liberal Feminists, Young and Wilmott argue that women are in ore paid work therefore families are becoming more symmetrical.
What is ‘The Commercialisation of Housework’?
An argument that Y&W put forward that states that more technological devices are being created and inputted into the household, meaning women are having their dedicated “roles” taken away from them.
This therefore lessens the force for women to stay in the house as they are no longer required to work manually.
Therefore, many more women then go into full-time jobs, ergo, making a more symmetrical household.
Advantages to the Division of Labour
- Specialisation of Labour.
- Quicker training.
- Productivity - where each worker is able to complete their dedicated tasks quicker.
- Efficient Allocation of Workers - when a worker is assigned a specific task suited to their personal skills, the use of both their time and skills is maximised.
- Cheaper products - as businesses can now produce more products in a shorter amount of time, products become cheaper.
- Manufacturers no longer have to hire artisan level workers because their own workers are becoming more skilled and specialised in their task. Because these workers are less skilled, they also require a lower wage, allowing companies to make more money.
- Higher wages - although the low skilled workers invite a low wage, as workers become better at their specialised tasks, the productivity increases, earning companies more money, therefore giving said companies more profit to share with their workers.
Disadvantages of the Division of Labour
- Boredom from repetition - can lead to employees searching for a different job in a new workplace, losing companies employees.
- Interdependence and Dependence - workers depend on other workers as they are only skilled enough to complete their assigned task, leading them to need other workers to complete tasks outside of their specialty.
- Reduced opportunities for advancement - When workers are assigned a specific task, they become experts in this task, however, this can make it difficult for them to transfer to different schemes of work that require different skills. Often, a worker’s specialised skills aren’t transferrable.
- Lack of responsibility - workers can feel like their jo b is not important, leading to a lack of motivation. When a task fails, it becomes a time-consuming process to find exactly where in the line of production the error was made. When one worker produces an output, it is easy to measure and compare their work to others but when many people work on the same task, it becomes difficult to compare outputs and identify which workers aren’t working as hard as they should be.
What is the argument for the ‘Symmetrical Family’?
Young and Wilmott claimed that extended families used to be characterised by segregated conjugal roles (where the mother would stay at home to raise children and the father would become the bread-winner) meaning often couples would spend their leisure time apart. However, Young and Wilmott argue that this has been replaced by a privatised nuclear family characterised by symmetry.
Modern marriage is now characterised by joint conjugal roles, where couples will split their work between household and breadwinning, often meaning their leisure time can be shared and more couples participate in joint decision-making.
What has been the imapact of paid work on the family?
Most of the women Oakley studied in the 70s were full-time housewives, however now more women go out to work, either part-time or full-time.
What is the March of Progress view on whether couples are becoming more equal?
- Some sociologists take an optimistic iew, like Young and Wilmott with their ‘symmetrical family’ theory.
- They argue that women going out to work is creating a more equal division of labour at home.
- Men are becoming more involved with childcare and housework, just as women are becoming more involved with paid work outside the home.
What was Oriel Sullivan’s argument on whether couples are becoming more equal?
- Analysis of nationally representative data found a trend towards women doing a smaller share of the domestic work.
- Her analysis also showed an increase in couples with an equal division of labour, meaning men were taking up more tasks traditionally for women.
What is the feminist view on whether couples are becoming more equal?
- Women getting into more paid work has not lead to greater equality in the division of labour.
- There is still little sign of the New Man.
- Men don’t take an equal share of domestic work, it is instead that women now have a dual burden.
2012 Housework between men and women survey?
- Men, on average, did 8hours of housework a week whereas women did 13.
- Men spent 10hours on care for family members whereas women did 23.
- Therefore women did twice as much as men.
- The survey found that couples continue to divide household tasks down gender lines. With women typically doing things like washing, taking care of sick family members and cleaning whereas men would do small repairs around the house. This was alarmingly similar to 1994.
Problems with the 2012 Housework survey?
- It does not measure the qualitative differences in the tasks, Allan argues that, women’s tasks such as washing and cleaning are less intrinsically satisfying.
- Focuses on quantifiable aspects such as, who performs which task or how much time they spend doing them. Whilst this is helpful, it tells us nothing about who is ensuring that those tasks are done.
- Boulton points out that fathers often performed specific childcare tasks but it was the mothers that took overall responsibility for the child’s wellbeing.
What is ‘emotion work’?
- Arlie Russell Hochschild’s argument that taking care and responsibility for other family members is what’s called ‘emotion work’.
- Women often have to perform ‘emotion work’ where they take care of a child’s physical and mental wellbeing, such as handling jealousies and squabbling between siblings, making sure everyone is kepy happy whilst also trying to control their own emotions.
What is the ‘Triple Shift’?
- Jean Duncombe and Dennis Marsden.
- Housework, paid work and emotion work.
Southerton (2011)?
- Eventhough parents have equal leisure time, they have different experiences of it.
- Men are more likely to experience consolidated blocks of uninterrupted leisure time, whereas women’s leisure time is often punctuated by childcare.
- Women are also mroe likely to multitask than men which means they end up carrying a dual burden, in which they face an increase volume of activities to be managed.
