Division of family labour and perceived unfairness among mothers: the role of mattering to family members

Chinese and South Korean Families' Conceptualizations of a Fair Household Labor Distribution

“…Although members of a family agreed that there is inequality, they disagreed on whether their family's inequality is fair. This finding indicates that, in line with prior research, recognizing inequality is not sufficient in itself for perceiving the division as unfair (Braun et al, ; Lachance‐Grzela et al, ; Öun, ). While children, in keeping with recent findings (Midgette, ), considered fairness to mean either absolute equality or a measured form of equity, many adult participants redefined fairness in relational and relative terms.…”

“…Rather than a measured fairness (e.g., one in which inputs and outputs were being calculated and judged as unjust or not), adults appeared to prioritize relational elements, such as agreement and understanding. This suggests the importance of affect and relational factors as central interpersonal outcomes that both men and women value and which therefore inform their perceptions regarding the fairness of the gendered division of labor (Lachance‐Grzela et al, ; Thompson, ). It may be the case that relationship satisfaction may be prioritized over concerns for fairness, and that concerns for fairness can be seen to jeopardize the relationship.…”

“…The primary factor found to influence fairness perceptions is the actual proportion of inequality in the division of housework (Coltrane, ; Lachance‐Grzela, McGee, & Ross‐Plourde, ; Mikula, Riederer, & Bodi, ; Öun, ; Young, Wallace, & Polachek, ). In other words, the greater the disparity that is perceived between one's share of housework compared to one's partner, the more likely one is to perceive this as unfair, and conversely the greater equality between partner's division the more likely it is to be perceived as fair.…”

“…In support of this framework, Carriero and Todesco () found that comparison referents did impact fairness perceptions, but unexpectedly only in the case of men's comparison referents (i.e., comparing the behavior of a man with those of other men), where if the man was seen as doing less than other men, it was more likely to be considered unfair. In another study, Lachance‐Grzela et al () argued for the importance of investigating relational and interpersonal outcome values, such as whether women felt like they mattered. They found that Canadian mothers who thought they mattered less to their family members were more likely to consider doing a greater contribution of housework as unfair.…”

Capturing Conflicting Accounts of Domestic Labour: The Household Portrait as a Methodology

“…In the past 60 years, theoretical approaches to the domestic division of labour have become more sophisticated, while quantitative methods have long generated important findings about the (de)gendering of domestic tasks over time (Berk and Berk, 1979). They have also identified variation in domestic divisions of labour according to a number of socio-demographic indicators, such as social class (Warren, 2003), ethnicity (Kan and Laurie, 2018), education (Sullivan, 2010), and gender ideology (Lachance-Grzela et al, 2019) among others. However, the use of quantitative methods, usually surveys or some time-use studies, often assume that the time spent, whether the duration of time spent carrying out a task and/or the frequency with which it is done, is the most important aspect of the gender division of labour and often, in survey research, temporality is synonymous with the question of who takes responsibility for tasks.…”