Behind the scenes: gendered household labor schemas of managers and helpers

ABSTRACT

‘She cooks; I’ll clean the dishes’. ‘My wife picks up the kids. I drop them off’. If we consider the physical tasks only, we have an incomplete picture of the division of household labor. The thinking, planning, and managing of family work remains unaccounted for and hidden. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 22 heterosexual parents in the US, we analyze both the physical and mental household labor. We propose gendered household labor schemas to understand the still persistent inequality in housework and caregiving. Our study finds mothers and fathers think about, identify with, and assess their contributions distinctly – as managers or helpers – respectively. Managers are largely responsible for the mental labor, unable to opt-out of tasks unless they delegate to their husband helpers. Helpers are able to opt-in, but do so primarily through the execution of specific, assigned physical tasks while the mental labor remains the responsibility of the manager, their wife. As an explanatory mechanism, gendered household labor schemas build on our theorizing on the construction of the division of labor and offer the space to understand why there are lingering inequalities of the physical division of labor.

KEYWORDS:

• Mental labor
• division of household labor
• cognitive labor
• gender
• emotional labor
• family work

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Krista M. Brumley

Krista M. Brumley is an associate professor of sociology at Wayne State University. She focuses on gender, work-family, and work organizations in the US. Her current research examines how US workplace conditions impact employee work-family conflict, health and well-being, and relationships. She is the principal investigator for a NSF RAPID grant that uses mixed methods (surveys and interviews) to assess how work, family, and health among dual-income couples have changed within the context of COVID-19. Her project on gender and work uses qualitative interviews with women and men who hold managerial and professional positions in the automotive industry to analyze work-family conflict and career advancement.

Megan Edgar St. George

Megan Edgar St. George is a graduate student in sociology at Wayne State University. She focuses on gender and work, women and minorities in STEM, gendered care work, feminist theory, and intersectionality. Her dissertation examines the ideal worker norm among professional engineers to analyze their perceptions and experiences by gender and age cohort. Her master’s thesis analyzed flexible work arrangements among women engineers.