Topic: Division of housework and gendered expectations

Topic: Division of housework and gendered expectations

Like firms (or companies) households are often considered essential units of the economy: they are the sites or organizational units where labor is homed, fed, cared for, and reproduced. Yet households are also critically important spaces from a sociological perspective given how they are tied to the making of habits, roles, and expectations about the social world.

Households are clearly important for configuring gender roles that have consequences for society at large, but they are also spaces where gendered expectations have a direct impact on the lives and experiences of their inhabitants. One particular family of activities where these gendered expectations play a role is in the division of housework, that is, the unpaid forms of work that are needed to maintain households, from cleaning and cooking to taking physical and emotional care of the household’s dwellers.

In this assignment, I want you to read the paper by Michael Bittman, Paula England, and colleagues (“When does gender trump money?“) and answer the following questions.

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