Parental Responsibilities: Dilemmas of Measurement and Gender Equality
| Author | Andrea Doucet |
| Published date | 01 February 2015 |
| Date | 01 February 2015 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/jomf.12148 |
A D Brock University
Parental Responsibilities: Dilemmas
of Measurement and Gender Equality
Over the past half-century, enormous changes
have occurred in gendered divisions of house-
work and child care acrossmany countries, with
a growing consensus that there is a slow but
steady pace of change in gendered divisions of
time and tasks but one that is combined with
a puzzling persistence of gender differences in
parental caregivingresponsibilities. Rooted in a
14-year qualitative and ethnographic research
program that focuses mainly on breadwin-
ning mothers and fathers who self-identify as
stay-at-home or primary caregivers and guided
by genealogical and relational sociological
approaches, the author argues that the con-
cept of parental responsibility requires greater
attention and that its theorization and con-
ceptualization have critical implications for if
and how it can be measured, the methodolog-
ical approaches that might be used to assess
it, and the conceptual t between parental
responsibilities and gender equality.
Over the past half-century, signicant changes
have occurred in gender divisions of caregiv-
ing and breadwinning across many countries,
including Canada and the United States. This
is evident in rising rates of breadwinning
Department of Sociology and Department of Women’sand
Gender Studies, Brock University,500 Glenridge Ave., St.
Catharines, Ontario L2S 3A1, Canada
(adoucet@brocku.ca).
This article was edited by Kevin M. Roy.
Key Words: caregiving, family relations, gender, measure-
ment, parent–child relationships, qualitative methodology.
mothers (Wang, Parker, & Taylor, 2013) as
well as in fathers’ increasing commitment to
caregiving, as demonstrated by rising numbers
of stay-at-home fathers, single fathers, and
gay father households (Chesley, 2011; Gold-
berg, 2012; Livingston, 2013). These large
demographic and social shifts have prompted
equally substantial attention from social science
researchers who have produced and enacted a
complex array of quantitative and qualitative
measures to calculate who-does-what to arrive
at conclusions about the state of gender equality
in housework and parental care work. Most
of this work has taken place in a burgeoning
cross-national and cross-disciplinary eld of
research called “gender divisions of domestic
labor,” which has focused on assessing changes
in time, tasks, and responsibilities.
This eld of gender divisions of domestic
labor evolved slowly, with key works emerging
between the 1960s and 1980s (e.g., Berk, 1985;
Gavron, 1966; Hoffman & Nye, 1974; R. E.
Pahl, 1984), and developed into a large subeld
of family and feminist sociologies (for excellent
overviews, see Coltrane, 2000, 2010; Davis
& Greenstein, 2013; and Lachance-Grzela &
Bouchard, 2010). Across this eld, assessments
have pointed to a slow but steady pace of
change in gender divisions of domestic labor,
but one that is combined with a persistence of
gender differences and inequalities in domes-
tic and parental caregiving responsibilities. For
example, a recent international 16-country study
indicated that “cross-national trends in paid and
unpaid work time over the last 40 years reveal
a slow and incomplete convergence of women’s
224 Journal of Marriage and Family 77 (February 2015): 224–242
DOI:10.1111/jomf.12148
Parental Responsibilities and Gender Equality 225
and men’s work patterns” (Kan, Sullivan, &
Gershuny, 2011, p. 234); this research also
demonstrated that “women have been responsi-
ble for the bulk of routine housework and caring
for others, while men tend to spend their domes-
tic work time on non-routine domestic work”
(Kan et al., 2011, p. 236). These researchers,
and many others, conrm a point that Sarah
Fenstermaker Berk (1985, p. 195) made almost
30 years ago when she wrote about the “out-
standing stability” in mothers’ responsibility
for domestic work and children. Similarly,
Hochschild (2012) recently conrmed, more
than 20 years after her initial observation of
women’s “second shift” of gendered respon-
sibilities, that mothers “felt more responsible
for the home” (p. 7). Building on Hochschild’s
arguments about a “stalled revolution,” Bianchi,
Milkie, Sayer, and Robinson (2000, p. 197)
referred to the “persistence of employed wives’
primary responsibility for domestic labor,”
and Michael Bittman (2004) wrote, “although
recently men have shown a willingness to spend
more time with their children . . . change has
been very slow and the proportion of men
assuming equal responsibility is currently very
small” (p. 168; see also Bianchi, Robinson, &
Milkie, 2006, and Fox, 2009).
In the face of this ongoing problem of
the inequality of gendered responsibilities in
parental care there lies a persistent puzzle that
has received sparse attention in the past few
decades. Although massive attention has been
given to methodological and theoretical issues
associated with housework and child care, much
less consideration has been given to developing
theoretical and methodological approaches
to parental responsibilities. In this article, I
address this puzzle of how to dene, measure,
and research parental responsibilities by asking
several questions: What are parental responsi-
bilities? How and where are they enacted? Can
they be equal, and what might that equality look
like? Can they be measured, and how might
they be measured? What units of measurement
do we use, and can these units be compared
across households and across time? I argue that
the concept of parental responsibility requires
careful attention and that its theorization and
conceptualization have critical implications
for whether and how it can be measured, the
methodological approaches that might be used
to assess it, and the conceptual t between
parental responsibilities and gender equality.
This article is underpinned by a qualitative
research program that has explored practices and
meanings of parental responsibilities, care, and
domestic work; gender equality and gender dif-
ferences in domestic life; and the methodolog-
ical and epistemological challenges of coming
to know these everyday practices (e.g., Doucet,
1996, 2001, 2006, 2009, 2013). Three research
studies carried out over the past 14 years directly
inform this article and provide evidence for the
arguments I make. Although my research was
initially concerned with what is occurring within
households and who-does-what-and-why, I have
increasingly moved to consider how we study
and make sense of the narratives that arise
in these simultaneously intimate and political
corners of social life; that is, I have turned
more and more of my focus toward scrutiniz-
ing the theoretical, methodological, epistemo-
logical, and ontological underpinnings of this
eld as well as the taken-for-granted concepts
that guide research, constitute data, and produce
ndings.
This move is informed by two broad
approaches that combine theory, method,
ontology, and epistemology. The rst approach
can be broadly described as relational, rooted
in what Margaret Somers (2008), and Joan
Tronto (2013) call relational ontologies, what
feminist theorists of care (e.g., Held, 2005;
Kittay, 1999; Lynch, 2007; Ruddick, 1995;
Tronto, 1993, 2013) refer to as interdependent
and relational subjectivities, and what Mustafo
Emirbayer (1997) referred to as relational soci-
ology, whereby social realities are not viewed
as static “things” but as “dynamic, continuous,
and processual . . . unfolding relations” (p. 281;
see also Gabb, 2011; Morgan, 2011; and Powell
& Dépelteau, 2013). The second approach is
informed by Bourdieu and Wacquant’s (1992)
concept of epistemic reexivity (p. 41), which
entails a “constant questioning of the categories
and techniques of sociological analysis and of
the relationship to the world they presuppose,”
and by Margaret Somers’s (2008) “historical
sociology of concept formation,” which is the
“work of turning social science back on itself
to examine often taken-for-granted conceptual
tools of research” (p. 172). In this article, the
taken-for-granted conceptual tools explored are
parental caregiving responsibilities.
This article is organized into four sections.
The rst section focuses on selected conceptual
shifts that have occurred across the past three
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