The changing gender contract as the engine of work-and-family policies

Abstract

This paper shifts the comparative analysis of gender and welfare states from a focus on differences to a search for common features. The rise in women's labor force participation and resulting tensions between time allocated to work and to caregiving have led to a search for policies to reconcile productive and reproductive roles and a quest for gender equality in work and family life. Two questions result: first, why are structural changes in postindustrial society associated with efforts to increase the compatibility of domestic and market roles? And second, how and why are work and family restructuring and related social policies linked to a more egalitarian gender contract? Parsons' AGIL paradigm of evolutionary change suggests four functional exigencies that pull the various components of work-and-family policy in the direction of gender equality: (1) working-time policies promote adaptation to new demands; (2) equal employment opportunity and provision of child and elderly care promote role differentiation that enables heightened goal attainment both in work and caregiving; (3) broader eligibility for entitlements promotes integration of formerly excluded groups; and (4) value generalization of an adult worker/carer ideal and work-family reconciliation accomplish the legitimation of the new order in the cultural system as a whole. This analysis classifies social policies according to their function in facilitating the work-family nexus and thereby suggests the key elements that are required to reconcile work and family life in postindustrial society.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the Editor Janet Gornick and the anonymous reviewers whose critical comments and helpful suggestions introduced me to scholarly sources that I did not know and pushed me to answer questions I had not thought of. Their challenges helped me to articulate my analysis more clearly and advance my thinking far beyond where it had been at the outset.

Notes

1. This paper treats “equality between women and men” and the “gender contract” primarily in the context of the changing work-family nexus. But previous literature on gender in the welfare state has had a much broader reach. In order to situate my analysis with respect to this earlier work, I first discuss competing views from that more general perspective before concentrating on the narrower issue of evolving gender norms in work and family life.

2. It should be emphasized here that the logic of this functionalist analysis is not circular, as might be charged if (as cautioned by one anonymous reviewer) “social needs” of the postindustrial society were conflated “with their fulfillment”. Rather, it is the new challenges created by postindustrial society that people with competing interests must independently respond to. Their adaptations are sometimes successful and sometimes not. At the same time that there are some common features in the solutions that are adopted, there is also wide variation in the particulars both within and between nations.

3. Earlier Parsons (1942, Parsons and Bales 1955) had alienated feminists who thought he believed men's instrumental and women's expressive specializations were based on essential differences and could never result in husband/wife equality. These charges were especially relevant to his work that categorized the husband-father as the instrumental leader of the family who linked it to the public sphere whereas the wife-mother was the expressive leader of the family and was thereby inexorably tied to the private sphere. In the 1960s and 1970s, however, Parsons was intrigued by both the historic and contemporary women's movement. As advisor for Giele's doctoral dissertation and a mentor for her work on women's changing roles (Giele, 1961, 1978, 1995), he suggested that both the historic women's movement and the new feminism were examples of “adaptive upgrading”. He never spelled out the application of his upgrading theory to changing gender expectations, but this was eventually done by another of his former students, Miriam Johnson (1989).

4. Smelser's (1959) study of the industrial revolution and the factory system in England documented how the productive and reproductive functions of the family were wrenched apart. Men became specialized in work outside the home and women in domestic care, thereby creating a crisis in socializing children when both parents were in the factory, and a crisis of economic security if wage labor disappeared. In our day it is difficult to picture how the same process of structural differentiation is operating when male and female roles are becoming more similar. To some that looks like “de-differentiation” or less specialization. The solution to this conundrum is to understand differentiation as a process of creating more independent sub-units within a given system in order to be more competitive or to meet higher standards. Further “specialization” in this sense is occurring within the male or female role package so that tasks once inseparable from sex of the incumbent are no longer dependent on gender. Thus the craft knowledge of the typical female homemaker has been reduced to manageable and rationalized components (child care, respite care, cooking, cleaning, laundry) that can be performed by outside services or a husband or child. A parallel change has occurred in the male breadwinner role as fewer jobs require particular craft knowledge, long absences, physical strength or endurance, which were once thought to be inseparable from male attributes; women can now perform these jobs also.

5. In terms of Parsons' (1966) adaptive upgrading scheme, de-commodification and de-familialization can be interpreted as reflecting an integrative function, which extends citizenship to those who were formerly excluded from access to services or benefits because of inability to work or lack of the requisite family status. Their “inclusion” does not happen, however, until a new more complex division of labor has revealed alternative ways to gain a living and to sustain reproduction and daily life. One aspect of this process is further advancement in the division of labor between market, family, and state, such that the obligations peculiar to each are rationalized, disembedded from institutional subcultures, and made more transparent and interchangeable across institutional boundaries. Only then is it possible for society to afford the entitlements of full citizenship to the individual who lacks traditional work or family ties.

6. In addition to articulating the four-function paradigm, Parsons (1966) and his collaborators saw each function as having primacy at a different level of the social structure in an ascending hierarchy of control, as follows: adaptation (A) at the level of individual units; goal-attainment (G) at the level of collectivity; integration (I) at the level of institutions and the societal community; latent pattern maintenance and legitimation (L) through values and norms at the level of the culture (Fox et al.2005).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Janet Zollinger Giele

Janet Zollinger Giele is Professor Emerita of Sociology, Social Policy, and Women's Studies in the Heller School for Social Policy and Management, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA, USA, She has published extensively on gender, changing life patterns of women, and modern family structure.