Abstract
This article examines gender representations of family and parental roles among young people aged 11 to 14 years. It is based on the qualitative analysis of 792 essays written by Portuguese girls and boys attending compulsory education. The adolescents' texts express normative images and cultural representations about gender that are plural and indicative of several displacements and incongruences. When considering the most important representational patterns, both girls and boys emphasise what they conceive as a set of gaps between the culturally transmitted norms of gender equality and the concrete realities they observe in various daily circumstances, notably in the family, which is still marked by inequity and gendered dichotomised patterns.
Notes
1 See also Brannen and Moss (Citation2003), Brannen, Heptinstall, and Bhopal (Citation2000), Brannen et al. (Citation2002), Gaskell (Citation1983), O'Brien, Alldred, and Jones (Citation1996), O'Connor (Citation2006), O'Connor, Smithson, and Guerreiro (Citation2002), Pocock (Citation2005) and Thomson and Holland (Citation2002).
2 Obviously not forgetting the persistence of strong structural asymmetries in the labour market: women still earn less than men performing the same tasks and women's work is still characterized by the existence of strong segregation and precariousness patterns.
3 According to data from the Eurostat's Labour Force Survey 2011.
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