Equity Dynamics in the Perceived Fairness of Infant Care
| Author | Annette Mahoney,Alfred DeMaris |
| Published date | 01 February 2017 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/jomf.12331 |
| Date | 01 February 2017 |
A DM Bowling Green State University
A M Bowling Green State University∗
Equity Dynamics in the Perceived Fairness
of Infant Care
How is the perceived fairness of infant care
affected by spouses’ relative contributions to
it and to other domains of their relationship?
Longitudinal data on 178 couples expecting the
birth of their rst child were collected during a
period spanning approximately the rst year of
the child’s life. Overall, wives were more likely
than husbands to see infant care as fair to the
wife. Net of fathers’ contributions to infant care,
spouses were morelikely to see infant care as fair
to wives the more the father worked in paid labor
and did housework and the more wives beneted
in the sexual relationship. Fathers’ contributions
to infant care had a stronger effect on fairness
when the child was a son. The ndings are con-
sistent with equity predictions in that fathers’
compensatory contributions to other domains of
marriage counterbalance an unequal workload
in the arena of family work.
The distributive justice of unpaid household
labor has inspired substantial research atten-
tion during the past few decades. Most of this
attention has focused on spouses’ perceptions
of fairness of the division of labor in their
marriage with respect to household chores
Department of Sociology, Bowling Green State University,
Bowling Green, OH 43403 (ademari@bgsu.edu).
∗Department of Psychology, Bowling Green State
University,Bowling Green, OH 43403.
Key Words: equity theory, fairness perceptions, infant care,
infants, longitudinal study, multilevel modeling.
(e.g., DeMaris & Longmore, 1996; Gager &
Hohmann-Marriott, 2006; Mikula, Riederer,
& Bodi, 2012). Relatively less attention has
been given to the fairness of child care and,
in particular, infant care (some exceptions are
Grote & Clark, 1998; Grote, Naylor, & Clark,
2002; Hawkins Marshall, & Meiners, 1995;
Mikula, Schoebi, Jagoditsch, & Macher, 2009;
Reichle & Gefke, 1998). Caring for children
constitutes one of the most important functions
of the family. Moreover, it is a task associated
with considerable time, energy, and stress for
parents (Thompson & Walker, 1989). It is
therefore imperative that social scientists also
understand the extent to which this arena of
marriage is characterized by a sense of justice
and the factors contributing to this sense.
A common theoretical framework applied
to perceptions of fairness in household labor
is the distributive justice paradigm (Hawkins
et al., 1995; Kluwer, Heesink, & van de Vliert,
2002; Mikula et al., 2009; Thompson, 1991).
As women perform most unpaid family labor,
the paradigm is often couched in terms of
what affects women’s sense of fairness in
this endeavor. The framework suggests that
women’s evaluations of justice depend on
three components: the comparison standards
on which women base their judgments, the
extent to which domestic labor results in valued
outcomes for women, and the justications
employed by both spouses to legitimate the
existing division of labor. Generally, wives see
domestic labor as more unfairly apportioned the
Journal of Marriage and Family 79 (February 2017): 261–276 261
DOI:10.1111/jomf.12331
262 Journal of Marriage and Family
less their husbands contribute to it, the more
they compare husbands’ contributions to their
own contributions, and the less they feel appre-
ciated for the work they do (Hawkins et al.,
1995; Kluwer et al., 2002; Mikula et al., 2009).
Although useful, this paradigm is somewhat
limited. Its view of household labor as the focal
point of justice evaluations tends to disregard
the larger context of married life. In addition to
housework and child care, for example, spouses
need to relate to each other as companions and
lovers. Someone also needs to work in the paid
labor force to support the standard of living of
the household. Marriage is, above all, a partner-
ship, and couples understand that each spouse
has contributions to make in a number of poten-
tial domains relevant to family life. In recent
years, DeMaris and his associates have artic-
ulated a form of equity theory that stresses
the multidimensional nature of spousal contri-
butions as affecting various marital outcomes
including perceptions of housework fairness,
long-term marital stability, and marital quality
(DeMaris, 2007, 2010; DeMaris & Longmore,
1996; DeMaris, Mahoney, & Pargament, 2010).
In this article, we bring this perspective to bear
on evaluations of the fairness of infant care.
In particular, we employ longitudinal data
from a study of 178 married couples across the
transition to rst parenthood to examine deter-
minants of the perceived fairness of infant care.
(We use the term child care interchangeably
with infant care throughout the article to avoid
repetitiveness.) Four measurement occasions
were used during a period covering from the
third trimester of pregnancy to approximately a
year after the birth. We study husbands’ as well
as wives’ perceptions of justice in infant care.
Unlike some other studies that use single-item
measures of child-care fairness, we use a
multi-item measure referencing the fairness of
nine separate infant care tasks. To further tease
out differences in perceptions by gender, we use
a multilevel modeling strategy that illuminates
how factors affect both the level of justice in
infant care as well as the gender gap in justice
perceptions. We begin by reviewing relevant
theory.
T B
Gender Differences in Workload
The tone of much of the literature concerning the
fairness of domestic work was set in the 1980s
by Hochschild’s (1989) seminal work. Employ-
ing in-depth interviews with a small sample of
women, she claimed that men’s lack of par-
ticipation in housework and child care meant
that working women engaged in two shifts of
work. The rst shift was the regular work day;
the second shift was the additional work day
women put in taking care of housework and
child care after hours. On the basis of earlier
studies from the 1960s and 1970s, Hochschild
also estimated that women do about 15 hours
per week more total (paid and unpaid) work
than men. Thus came into being the image
of the lazy, leisure-loving husband refusing to
do his share of the domestic labor and stand-
ing in the way of the gender revolution. From
a social-psychological standpoint, the further
conundrum was that a majority of both women
and men saw this lopsided arrangement as fair
(Grote et al., 2002), although women were more
likely than men to report this as unfair to the wife
(Gager & Hohmann-Marriott, 2006).
Recent reevaluations of time-use and other
data suggest that claims of female work over-
load and male goldbricking have been largely
exaggerated. Time-diary evidence taken from
separate surveys spanning the 1960s to the
1990s suggests that men’s contributions to
both housework and child care have expanded
in response to women’s increased labor-force
involvement. At the same time, women have
cut back on their hours in family work, with the
result that the gender gap in household labor
has diminished (Bianchi, 2011; Bianchi, Milkie,
Sayer, & Robinson, 2000; Sayer, Bianchi, &
Robinson, 2004). An extensive recent study of
time-use data from Australia and the United
States found that on average and across all
family types, total work time is close to parity,
with men actually putting in about an hour
and a half more per week of total (paid and
unpaid) work than women (Sayer, England,
Bittman, & Bianchi, 2009). Moreover, there is
some evidence that men’s jobs are more likely
than women’s to involve considerable stress.
For example, although men constituted 53%
of the workforce in 2013, they accounted for
93% of workplace fatalities. The occupations
listed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (2014)
as having the highest fatal injury work rates are
largely monopolized by men, with the propor-
tion of women ranging from 23.8% (farmers,
ranchers, and other agricultural managers) to
less than 10% (logging workers, shers and
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