Gendered families: states and societies in transition

ABSTRACT

Family life has changed significantly in recent decades for both women and men. Fertility rates have dropped, numbers divorcing have increased, and the proportion of children born outside marriage has grown. At the same time, we have seen significant changes in state forms and institutions, with marketization becoming embedded in centrally planned economies as well as welfare states. Women increasingly participate in labour markets and higher education, as expectations of equal opportunity have expanded. Despite obvious improvements in female employment and educational attainment, however, gender inequalities persist, not least in law, policy, labour markets, and family roles. Women continue to provide the bulk of informal multigenerational care. Work and family policies vary across the globe, yet policy analysis from a gender perspective is scarce. This editorial considers research from around the world, including Europe, the former Soviet bloc, Japan, and China, to develop an understanding of the tensions and shifts in the gendered organisation of family lives. Changes and continuities in gendered inequalities shaping family life are examined, with a focus on the intersection of state, labour market, and family, as they reproduce and reshape gender norms and inequalities.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender
• equality
• labour market
• family
• policy

Gendered families: states and societies in transition

The family lives of women and men have changed in many ways in recent decades. In most OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries, the fertility rate has dropped, the number divorcing has increased, and the proportion of children born outside marriage has grown (OECD, n.d.; 2011). These recent patterns are closely associated with changes in the gender order (Scarborough, Sin, & Risman, 2019; Messerschmidt, Martin, & Messner, 2018). Women increasingly participate in the labour market and higher education, as expectations of equal opportunity have expanded. However, despite obvious improvements in female employment rates and educational attainment, gender inequalities persist, not least in law, policies, labour markets, and family roles.

At the same time, we have seen some significant changes in states and institutions, not least in response to capitalism’s new neoliberal ‘spirit’ (Boltanski & Chiapello, 2005). Dictatorships characterised by central economic planning have moved towards entrepreneurial competition, privatisation, and the rhetoric of democracy (Zhang, 2008). Welfare states have declined as market forces have taken over, restricting access to public goods (Clarke, 2004). Liberal democracies have seen a rise in authoritarian populism, driven by resentful responses to these profound structural changes in economies and societies (Cohen, 2019). The global impact of Russia’s imperialist assault on Ukraine is yet to be determined (Guenette, Kenworthy, & Wheeler, 2022).

Capitalism’s ‘new spirit’ has contributed to the erosion of social protections, not least for those engaged in family care work, often women (Seedat & Rondon, 2021). States across the globe have moved towards a de-gendered ‘adult worker’ model for family policy, and care has become a focus of marketisation (Lewis & Giullari, 2005). In practice, a ‘one-and-a-half earner household’ is closer to the norm in Western European countries, as parenting and informal caregiving remain strongly gendered (Daly, 2011). One consequence is that social protection is ever more closely tied to individual participation in labour markets, with damaging consequences for family care (Lewis & Giullari, 2005).

Whatever types of ‘ideal’ family-state relationship we examine, empirical evidence tends towards a gendered division of labour which crosses and connects paid and unpaid work. Unequal sharing of unpaid work between women and men poses challenges to states and societies across the globe (OECD, 2017a). While women’s participation in paid work has increased substantially, men’s involvement in unpaid work has not improved significantly (Sung & Pascall, 2014). The OECD report on gender equality (2017a) highlights the importance of valuing care, and especially men’s involvement in caregiving, as a key policy plank to reverse this longstanding pattern.

The gendered division of labour has been a significant feature of welfare scholarship (Daly, 2011; Lewis, 1992; Orloff, 1993; Sainsbury, 1999). Various patterns of distributing paid and unpaid work between adults in nuclear families provide keystones for gender analysis, notably the ‘male breadwinner’ (Lewis, 1992), ‘adult worker’ (Lewis & Giullari, 2005) and ‘universal caregiver’ (Fraser, 1997) models. Early comparative studies of welfare state regimes were mainly focused on the relationship between paid employment and welfare (Esping-Andersen, 1990), drawing criticism for neglecting gender issues (Lewis, 1992; Orloff, 1993). The importance of women’s unpaid work in social protection has become a significant focus of research, and policymaking, in response.

In the context of family life, women do on average twice as much unpaid work as men (OECD, 2022b). Motherhood remains an intensely moralised social role so that parenting continues to have differential consequences for women and men’s social status and emotional experience (Smyth, 2012; Doucet, 2015). In Asian countries such as China and Japan, the time women spend on unpaid work is particularly high (OECD, 2017b). For societies in the East, heavy reliance on informal family support for the provision of care for children and the elderly begs the question of how to transform the entrenched gendered division of unpaid work. In the global North, the decline of the male breadwinner model has been fundamental to family change (Lewis, 2001; Pascall, 2012).

Women continue to provide much more informal multigenerational care than men. The family care women provide is often more intensive than that provided by men, taking place at crucial junctures when the impact across the woman’s life course is compounded (Patterson & Margolis, 2019). The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the undervalued character of family care as an essential support to vulnerable life (Kent, Ornstein, & Nicholas Dionne-Odom, 2020). It has also intensified the gender gap in caregiving, employment, income, and social protection (UN Women, 2020b).

In the labour market, gender-based stratification remains evident. Women continue to earn less than men; are more likely to work in part-time lower-paid sectors; and are less likely to be employed at managerial and executive levels. The average gender pay gap in OECD countries is 12.5 percent. In Asian countries (e.g. Japan and China), it has been notably higher than in the global North (OECD, 2022a). On average, 24.5 percent of employed women were working part-time, in contrast to only 9 percent of employed men (OECD, 2017a). These asymmetries have been deepened by COVID-19 (International Labour Organisation, 2020a,b), reflecting gendered access to employment and welfare (UN Women, 2020a, 2021).

While work and family patterns of regulation and social expectation vary across the globe, there is a lack of gender analysis of underlying processes, particularly for East Asia (Sung & Pascall, 2014). Moreover, although there have been notable policy developments in the field of work and family, the extent to which these changes are effective is doubtful. For instance, while fathers’ involvement in childcare has been promoted in many Western countries (e.g. the ‘daddy’ quota in Sweden and shared parental leave in the UK), pay during paternity and parental leave from employment tends to remain low globally (OECD, 2017a; Sung, 2018).

Family policy plays a significant role in improving gender inequality (Shaver, 2018), with the potential for changing the interests, beliefs and norms of individuals, societies, and states more generally (Campbell, 2012; Grunow, Begall, & Buchler, 2018). At the same time, policies often perpetuate gender inequalities, not least through their implicit assumptions concerning the ‘natural’ arrangements for caregiving (Daly, this volume). As Gangl and Ziefel (2015) suggest, egalitarian policy design, involving for instance the introduction or extension of maternity leave, non-gender specific parental leave, or leave reserved for fathers, may affect societal norms. Such interventions can transform expectations concerning caregiver roles and practices, for instance by providing incentives or options for joint earning and caring. More traditionalist types of policy in this context, including unpaid or low-paid parental leave, lengthy maternity leave, and a lack of state support for childcare, reinforce and entrench inequality. Policies that encourage an equal sharing of paid and unpaid work and provide genuine choices for both women and men are crucial.

A spate of family policy measures has recently been introduced in many countries, aiming to encourage a more equal distribution of the unpaid work of domestic labour and care. The extension of paternity leaves and flexible work arrangements to fathers, and the introduction of father-specific leave, are key elements of this change. Paid parental leave is now offered in twenty-three OECD countries for instance, although this is not universal. Its uptake by men continues to be low, while gradually on the increase (OECD, 2016).

Against this background, the commodification of care has meant that family relations have been subject to the logic of instrumental efficiency in the effort to plan and manage care, despite its often-unpredictable character. Markets have moved into the family domain, in ways which Hochschild (2012) argues risk outsourcing our very selves, as we commodify human relationships and emotions in our efforts to find ‘solutions’ to support vulnerability and basic needs. Commodification trends in welfare states have expanded ‘care capital’, making care big business at the international level, with negative consequences for the quality and affordability of childcare (Williams, 2021a). While care costs have increased, the tendency towards deregulation has undermined processes for ensuring quality provision.

Part of this transition is that individuals in market societies are expected to find a ‘balance’ between commitments to paid ‘work’, and to ‘life’, including the unpaid work of family care. The impact of this version of individualisation on family life and work, particularly for former socialist societies with embedded egalitarian norms, remains unclear when the gap between expressed preferences and daily practices are considered (Kwak, this volume). However, despite obvious improvements in female employment rates and educational attainment, gender inequalities persist, not least in law, policies, labour markets, and family roles.

Meanwhile, the high value placed on flexibility and adaptability in contemporary labour markets requires workers to be unconstrained by family care responsibilities, and available to work long hours in a globally mobile workforce (Boltanski & Chiapello, 2005). The consequences of this for the very possibility of having or raising children are far-reaching (Romero-Balsas et al., this volume). Further research exploring the gendered quality of global labour market pressures is needed.

At the same time, the gendered notion of ‘family devotion’ remains central to normative attitudes toward mothering across western liberal and post-socialist societies (Blair-Loy, 2009; Collins, 2019). Social status for mothers tends to depend on demonstrating dedication to the role, principally through ‘intensive’ forms of caregiving (Hays, 1996). Thus, we have the phenomenon of mothers in professional employment engaging exhaustively in paid work and at the same time in intensive caregiving, as they face the ‘wrenching contradiction’ between family and career (Blair-Loy, 2009, p. 5). The physical, social, and emotional strain of these ‘competing devotions’, including the lost sleep and chronic stress tracked by Tan et al. (this volume), are rooted in the effort to secure reassurance that employed mothers are ‘competent and moral adults’ (Blair-Loy, 2009, p. 5). The sleep disturbances which mothers working long hours are especially vulnerable to raises an important issue for employment and health policy. This hidden gendered burden of exhaustion and stress shapes routine emotional experience and ability to cope with employment, childcare, and domestic labour for working, partnered mothers in distinct ways (Tan et al., this volume).

Working mothers can find themselves in an impossible bind when social protections for family care are limited or missing. Careers often fail to develop, and research from the US has demonstrated that professionally successful mothers tend to be regarded as either likable but somewhat incompetent at work, or professionally competent but unlikeable. This contrasts with the rewards fathers accrue in professional life, as fatherhood is understood to enhance warmth without compromising professional competence. This gendered normative discrimination has significant consequences for pay and promotion (Benard & Correll, 2010). Evidence from contemporary China (Zhang, this volume) reveals the absence of change in the wake of the transition to a market economy and the lifting of the one-child rule. Mothers continue to bear the burden of coordinating everyday care and domestic labour in managing children’s lives, while participating in a long-hours employment culture. Dependency on unpaid care from grandparents and others, often women remains a central feature of the struggle to coordinate work and family lives.

The ways in which gender intersects with class, race-ethnicity, and other forms of inequality dramatically shape the dimensions of family and gender inequalities. For instance, the experiences of migrant workers employed in elder care across Europe are marked by multiple forms of subordination (Sahraoui, 2019). Class polarisation of mothers in the labour market can reflect policy changes across divergent yet overlapping fields, such as education, health, and employment. For instance, recent changes in educational policy in Japan have intensified pressures on mothers to help children succeed, leading to an increased labour market exit for those in irregular employment at the lower end of the social gradient. At the same time, the expansion of employment supports for mothers in secure regular employment has created a tendency in the opposite direction (Nishimura, this volume).

The complex moral dynamics involved in coping with limited resources present specific constraints for mothering (Leonard and Kelly, this volume). Research on the ‘silent revolution’ which has been transforming Latin American families over the last 50 years demonstrates strong divergences by social class and ethnicity. While upper-middle income earners tend towards dual-earning marriages, delayed fertility, and a move towards a more egalitarian distribution of domestic labour and childcare, lower-income earners tend towards early and high fertility, unstable partnerships, a strongly gendered division of labour, and a reduction in men’s involvement in providing and caring for families (Blofield, Filgueira, Giambruno, & Franzoni, 2021).

The global connections between intensive maternal caregiving, marketized states, global relations of exploitation, and gender inequality cause real distress for mothers, in the daily effort to raise children against a background of patchy social protections and strong normative evaluations which tend to reinforce gendered boundaries between care and ‘work’. Nevertheless, questions of justice and equality have been pushed to the background, as individualist norms have become entrenched in market societies, including in family life and intimate relations (Boltanski & Chiapello, 2005; Smyth, 2012). The social, political, and economic drivers of inequality in family care and domestic labour are lost in the individualist norms of ‘work/life balance’ and subjective ‘wellbeing’ (Cederström, 2015).

Strongly gendered patterns of responsibility for care reflect the maternalism embedded in family policy across different state types, despite the rhetoric of individual responsibility and choice (Bedford & Rai, 2010; Daly, this volume). Policy approaches which treat caregiving as morally motivated, more an expression of love than a type of work requiring protection and support, contributes to this trend (Moen and DePasquale, 2017). Gender inequality persists in the face of growing marketisation across Europe, as policy shifts towards a deliberately gender-neutral ‘parentalism’. While fatherhood has become a focus of political interest and contestation, the pressure for change is softened by market-friendly policies (Daly, this volume). Maternalist policies cannot transform gender inequalities in families, as research from Latin America indicates (Blofield et al., 2021).

Views on how to achieve gender equality within and between families and wider social relations vary. Fraser’s (1997) call for a citizenry of ‘universal caregivers’ articulates the value and satisfactions of a society where paid and unpaid work are equally shared by women and men. While social protection based on a model of de-gendered adult workers expects participation in paid work through expanded private provision of childcare, Fraser’s alternative switches this around, so that welfare is distributed on the assumption of ‘adult caregiver’ citizens. The ability of such a society to attend fully to the possibility of diverse, possibly strongly gendered ‘life-mix preferences’, where some men prefer a working life or a caring life and some women prefer a working life or a caring life, has recently been considered (Chau & Yu, 2022).

Tronto (2017, p.33) calls for a ‘caring democracy’, where care is treated as a central public good and core democratic task. Collins argues for a politics of ‘work-family justice’ to address the powerful drivers of maternal stress (2019, p. 7), distributing the work of care and the satisfactions of other forms of work more evenly. The relationship between family policy and cultural landscapes cannot be ignored if a more equal distribution of care and domestic labour is to be achieved, in ways which are fully supported by states (Collins, 2019, p. 256). Pfau-Effinger’s (2004) theory of ‘gender arrangements’ highlights the interplay of cultural, institutional, social, and economic contexts in relation to women’s employment decisions and patterns in divisions of labour in Western societies. Such an approach would also need to address ongoing ‘imperial relations of extraction’ shaping contemporary welfare arrangements and the global commodification of care (Williams, 2021b).

This Special Issue explores changes and continuities in gendered inequalities and orientations to family life, care, and employment across a variety of states and societies. With a focus on the relationship between states, labour markets, and families, as they reproduce and transform gender norms and inequalities, the papers in this collection consider evidence from across the globe, including Europe, the former Soviet bloc, China, and Japan. Analyses concentrate on the intersection of state, labour market, and social norms as they shape, reshape, and ultimately appear to sustain the gendered quality of family life, as states and societies undergo significant political, economic, and normative transformations.

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sirin Sung

Sirin Sung is Senior Lecturer in Social Policy at Queen's University Belfast, UK. Her main research interests include gender and family policy in both the UK and East Asian countries. Her publications include an edited volume Gender and Welfare State in East Asia: Confucianism or Gender Equality? (2014), Palgrave (With Gillian Pascall), and ‘Gender, Work and Care in Policy and Practice’, in Critical Social Policy (2018).

Lisa Smyth

Lisa Smyth is Reader in Sociology at Queen's University Belfast, working on social norms and emotions in relation to gender equality, family life, and social change. Her most recent monograph is The Demands of Motherhood: Agents Roles and Recognition (2012). She is co-Chief Editor of the Irish Journal of Sociology.