Gendering or Equality in the Lives of Nordic Heterosexual Couples with Children: No Well‐Paved Avenues Yet

Abstract

This article presents a Nordic comparative study of the joint accounts cohabiting women and men with children give about their everyday organization of house‐work and child‐care. The study was part of a Nordic study of political gender equality discourses at different societal levels. The article focuses on how heterosexual couples in Denmark, Finland and Sweden give meaning to house‐work sharing, and the consequences of these meanings. For instance, do differences in the degree of sharing of tasks relate to differences in how couples recruit traditionally gendered discourses in the conversations, and in how they “gender” house‐work, or rhetorically use masculinity and femininity in their accounts? Distinctly different patterns of rhetorical gendering appeared in couples with very unequal, as compared to fairly equal, house‐work sharing patterns. The article discusses these differences in terms of variations in gendered boundaries and limits of personal space, and their relations to power issues in couples.

Notes

1. The study was part of the Nordic project Nordic gender equalities between rhetoric and practice. It was financially supported by NOS‐S, Nordiska samarbetsnämnden för samhällsforskning (the Joint Committee for Nordic Research Councils for the Humanities and the Social Sciences), and by NIKK (Nordic Institute for Women's Studies and Gender Research).

2. And indeed often in other kinds of hierarchy producers, often related to class, ethnicity or sexuality. In this study, gender is the main focus.

3. The interviewers were researchers of the same nationality as the couples. They were: in Denmark, Elisabeth Hellemose Lorentzen; in Finland, Kristin Mattsson; in Sweden, Lena Wännman. The interviewers participated in developing the interview guide and transcribed the interviews. They also in helpful ways shared their impressions and reflections during and after the interviews and contributed to parts of the analyses.

4. In all Nordic countries, 10–15 financially compensated days are set aside for the father to stay at home with the mother and child after childbirth. These days are used by most fathers.

5. Men could take parental leave with the same financial compensation as women. Such legislation had existed for over twenty years. As the length of the parental leave varies between countries, comparing the number of days spent at home is not meaningful. Since the beginning of the 1990s, governments in these countries have increased pressure on fathers to take leaves, by reserving a proportion of the paid parental leave for the father's use.