Barbara Risman, President of CCF, receives the 2019 Distinguished Lectureship Award from the Southern Sociological Society! This award honors a record of excellence as a scholar and lecturer. It was presented at the 2019 annual meeting of the Southern Sociological Society in Atlanta, GA.
News & Upcoming Events
CCF Executive Director Jennifer Glass Receives Harriet B. Presser Award
Jennifer Glass, Executive Director of CCF, receives the 2019 Harriet B. Presser Award offered by the Population Association of America! This award honors a record of sustained research contributions to the study of gender and demography. It was presented at the 2019 annual meeting of the PAA in Austin, TX.
https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/prc/news/article.php?id=13957
CCF PRESS ADVISORY: In Time to Join #MeToo, Research Highlights Men’s Growing Support for Gender Equality
CONTACT: Virginia Rutter / Framingham State University Sociology
CCF Press Advisory
In Time to Join #MeToo, Research Highlights Men’s Growing Support for Gender Equality
April 3, 2018, Austin, TX: Two new studies, presented today to the Council on Contemporary Families, reveal that despite the serious obstacles still standing in the way of achieving full gender equality, progress continues. Married men are expanding their contributions on the home front, and data from the General Social Survey show men at their highest levels yet of support for gender equality.
Dan Carlson of the University of Utah reports on a new study with co-authors Amanda Miller and Sharon Sassler that expands on their earlier research: It had shown that sharing housework now increases happiness for heterosexual couples. The new work finds sharing housework is good news for the bedroom, though how good depends on what you’re sharing.
Carlson’s report on housework underscores what David Cotter (Union College, New York) indicates about trends in attitudes: When looking at men’s and women’s roles at home and at work, a stall in support for gender equality in the 1990s was followed by advances in the 2000s, and mixed results in the 2010s. But in 2016, support for all aspects of gender equality reached new highs. While men have consistently been less egalitarian than women since the 1970s, the gap between their attitudes has narrowed in recent years. “History seldom proceeds in a straight line,” notes Stephanie Coontz, CCF’s director of research and education, “but when you even out the ups and downs, the increase in approval of gender equality, at home and at work, over the past 40 years has been truly dramatic.”
Highlights
In Not All Housework is Created Equal: Particular Housework Tasks and Couples’ Relationship Quality, Carlson shares a couple of intriguing findings:
- By 2006, the proportion of lower and moderate income parents sharing house cleaning had nearly doubled, to 22 percent, and the proportion sharing the laundry had risen to 21 percent, an increase of 129 percent.
- In 1992 the division of tasks mattered little for couples’ well-being. But, by 2006, couples who equally shared tasks demonstrated clear advantages in relationship quality over couples where one partner shouldered the load.
- Which tasks partners shared made a difference. Men who shared the shopping for their household reported greater sexual and relationship satisfaction than men who did either less or more shopping than their partner.
- And for women? Sharing responsibility for dishwashing was the single biggest source of satisfaction for women. Lack of sharing in this task was the single biggest source of discontent with their marital relationship.
In Patterns of Progress? Changes in Gender Ideology 1977-2016, Cotter provides four graphics that chart change.
- Overall, people have become more egalitarian about such issues as support for working mothers, whether men should be in charge at home, and whether men are superior to women in politics. The upward lines in Figures 1 and 2 tell it all.
- The change has more to do with generational replacement than anything else, as you’ll see in Figure 4. The younger generations—groups referred to as Baby Boomers, Gen-Xers, and Millennials–all trend together towards high levels of egalitarianism.
- The biggest news is that men are catching up to women, as seen in Figure 3. Men are still less egalitarian than women, but the gap between men and women has declined significantly in the past four years.
Where do we stand today?
Discussions about gender equality tend to invite that “glass half full / glass half empty” response, notes Stephanie Coontz, who reviewed these reports. “As we know from #MeToo, we have a long way to go. But to reach gender equity, we started with a very tall glass that had sat empty for thousands of years. The fact that we’ve filled it this far in just forty years should give us confidence to keep pouring.”
-continue –
CONTACTS:
Stephanie Coontz, Professor of History, The Evergreen State College and CCF Director of Research and Public Education, at coontzs@msn.com, cell 360-556-9223.
Dan Carlson, Assistant Professor, Family and Consumer Studies, University of Utah, daniel.carlson@fcs.utah.edu.
David A. Cotter, Professor of Sociology, Union College, cotterd@union.edu.
LINKS:
CCF Brief: Not All Housework is Created Equal: Particular Housework Tasks and Couples’ Relationship Quality
(https://contemporaryfamilies.org/houseworkandrelationshipquality/)
CCF Brief: Patterns of Progress? Changes in Gender Ideology 1977-2016
(https://contemporaryfamilies.org/genderideology1977-2016/)
CCF Advisory: In Time for #MeToo, Research Highlights Men’s Growing Support for Gender Equality
(https://contemporaryfamilies.org/nomoregenderstalladvisory/)
The Council on Contemporary Families, based at the University of Texas-Austin, is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization of family researchers and practitioners that seeks to further a national understanding of how America’s families are changing and what is known about the strengths and weaknesses of different family forms and various family interventions.
The Council helps keep journalists informed of notable work on family-related issues via the CCF Network. To join the CCF Network, or for further media assistance, please contact Stephanie Coontz, Director of Research and Education, at coontzs@msn.com, cell 360-556-9223.
Follow us! @CCF_Families and https://www.facebook.com/contemporaryfamilies
Read our blog CCF @ The Society Pages – https://thesocietypages.org/ccf/
April 3, 2018
CCF BRIEF: Not All Housework is Created Equal: Particular Housework Tasks and Couples’ Relationship Quality
Not All Housework is Created Equal: Particular Housework Tasks and Couples’ Relationship Quality
A brief report prepared for the Council on Contemporary Families by Dan Carlson, Assistant Professor, Family and Consumer Studies, University of Utah, daniel.carlson@fcs.utah.edu.
April 3, 2018
The stories inspired by the #MeToo movement reveal that despite decades of struggle for gender equality at work, patriarchy, misogyny, and the sexual objectification of women run deep. And yet the fact that some harassers, abusers, and predators are being held accountable indicates that proponents of gender equality continue to make progress.
But what’s happening on the home front? Has the gender revolution there stalled or is progress being made? Today, married men do roughly four hours of housework per week, up from two hours in 1965 but roughly the same as in 1995 (Bianchi et al. 2012). Married women perform much less housework today than in 1965 (14.2 hours vs. 30.4), but the amount hasn’t changed much since the mid-90s (14.2 hours vs. 15.8). Although it appears that men are doing more around the house and women are doing less, it’s not always the case. A lot of higher-earning families these days are hiring people to complete some of their chores for them. This can range from hiring someone to complete their laundry to hiring a company like Clean Pro Gutter Cleaning Naperville to ensure that their gutters aren’t blocked up. Both chores are equally as important, but sometimes it’s easier for working families to get professionals to complete the tasks to higher standards. Among youth, egalitarian attitudes about male authority at home and separate gender spheres increased from the 1960s through the mid-90s, but have reversed since, becoming more conventional.
Does this mean the gender revolution stalled? Not necessarily. Since the mid-90s, women have obtained a larger share of college degrees than men and increasingly earn as much or more than their partners, especially in the middle, working, and lower classes (Glynn 2012). Men have nearly tripled the amount of time they spend in direct care of children since 1965, with more than half of these gains occurring since the 90s (Bianchi et al. 2012) and twice as many men today are stay-at-home dads than 20 years ago, with four times as many saying they are doing it to care for their family (Pew Research Center 2014). Additionally, even though the attitudes of youth have become more conventional, results from the U.S. General Social Survey (GSS) indicate that after a lull in the mid-90s, U.S. adults’ valuation of gender egalitarianism has continued to increase since the mid-2000s (Shu and Meagher 2018).
In new research published this month in Socius, my colleagues Amanda Miller, Sharon Sassler, and I find a significant increase in the proportion of low- to moderate-income parents sharing routine housework tasks between 1992 and 2006. In the 1990s, couples were most likely to share shopping (28%) and dishwashing (16%) and least likely to share laundry (9%) and house cleaning (12%). By 2006, the proportion of couples sharing house cleaning had nearly doubled, to 22 percent, and the proportion sharing the laundry had risen to 21 percent, an increase of 129 percent. The proportion who shared cooking rose from 13 percent to 21 percent while the proportion sharing dishwashing increased from 16 to 29 percent. The increase in shared shopping was less dramatic – from 28 to 30 percent-but it remains the most frequently shared task, now closely followed by dishwashing. And the percent of couples where men did the majority of cooking, cleaning, laundry, and dishes roughly doubled from 1992 to 2006.
The gender revolution can be measured not only by the way we arrange our lives, but also by the consequences of those arrangements. And that too appears to have changed. In earlier decades, couples who shared housework equally reported lower levels of marital and sexual satisfaction, and less frequent sex, than couples who adhered to a more “conventional” division of labor. But for married and cohabiting couples since the early 1990s, the reverse is true. Although less than one-third of the couples we studied shared housework equally, these were the couples who, in contrast to couples in earlier decades, reported the highest marital and sexual satisfaction. In fact, this is the only group among which the frequency of sexual intercourse has increased since the early 90s. In our new study, we confirmed that egalitarian sharing of tasks has become more important for relationship quality. In 1992, the division of tasks mattered little for couples’ well-being. By 2006, couples who equally shared tasks demonstrated clear advantages over couples where one partner shouldered the load.
As it turns out, though, all housework isn’t created equal. Our new study reveals that some tasks are more closely associated with relationship quality than others.
For contemporary men, sharing shopping with their partner seems to be a turn on. Men who shared the shopping for their household not only reported greater sexual and relationship satisfaction than men who did the majority of this work, but also greater satisfaction than men whose partner did the majority of shopping. For cleaning and laundry, men reported lower relationship and sexual satisfaction and more discord when they did the majority of these tasks, but they were just as satisfied when these tasks were shared as when their partner did them.
For women, the shared task that mattered most for their satisfaction with their relationship was dishwashing. As of 2006, women who found themselves doing the lion’s share of dishwashing reported significantly more relationship discord, lower relationship satisfaction, and less sexual satisfaction than women who split the dishes with their partner. Sharing responsibility for dishwashing was the single biggest source of satisfaction for women among all the household tasks, and lack of sharing of this task the single biggest source of discontent.
One overarching pattern that emerged from our data is that the more common it is to share a task, the more damaging to relationship quality it is for just one partner to shoulder responsibility for it. This is why shopping and dishwashing appear to matter so much for relationship quality. It seems individuals and couples take stock of their arrangements in comparison to those around them, and those assessments of relative advantage or disadvantage come to shape their feelings about their arrangements and their relationships overall. This suggests that as the sharing of other tasks becomes more common, the benefits of sharing — and the costs of not sharing — increase. Such a pattern sounds less like a movement undergoing a stall and more like one that is continuing to build.
References
Carlson, D.L., Miller, A.J., & Sassler, S. (2018). Stalled for Whom? Change in the division of particular housework tasks and their consequences for middle- to low-income couples. Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World. Online first.
Bianchi, S. M., Sayer, L. C., Milkie, M. A., & Robinson, J. P. (2012). Housework: Who did, does or will do it, and how much does it matter?. Social Forces, 91(1), 55-63.
Glynn, Sarah Jane. 2012. The New Breadwinners: 2010 Update Rates of Women Supporting Their Families Economically Increased Since 2007. Center for American Progress. Washington DC.
Pew Research Center. 2014. Growing Number of Dads Home with the Kids: Biggest increase among those caring for family. Retrieved on March 15th from http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2014/06/05/growing-number-of-dads-home-with-the-kids/
Shu, X., & Meagher, K. D. (2018). Beyond the Stalled Gender Revolution: Historical and Cohort Dynamics in Gender Attitudes from 1977 to 2016. Social Forces, 96, 1243-1274.
April 3, 2018
CCF BRIEF: Patterns of Progress? Changes in Gender Ideology 1977-2016
Patterns of Progress? Changes in Gender Ideology 1977-2016
A briefing paper prepared for The Council on Contemporary Families by David A. Cotter, Department of Sociology, Union College, cotterd@union.edu.
April 3, 2018
The General Social Survey[i] has been asking a set of four questions about gender ideology since the mid 1970s. These cover the relative suitability of women and men for politics, whether or not families should have a breadwinner/homemaker division of responsibilities, and whether mothers’ employment is harmful to children. From the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s, the answers to each of these trended in an egalitarian direction. Then from the mid-1990s to the early 2000s this support for gender equality stalled, even reversed. Since the early 2000s, however, all have returned to an egalitarian direction – and in every case are now above their mid-1990s peak. (See Figure 1.)
The Gender Ideology Index my colleagues Joan Hermsen, Reeve Vanneman and I use is comprised of these four questions, which have been asked most consistently in the General Social Survey since the 1970s. For each egalitarian answer a respondent gets one “point,” so that someone who answered all four questions in an egalitarian way would get four points, and someone who answered all four in a traditionalist way would get a score of zero. The index now allows us to trace almost forty years of change. As with the items that make it up, it charts a pattern of rapid change from the 1970s up to the mid-1990s, a stall, and then a resumption of the trend toward egalitarianism. See Figure 2.
Gender Ideology by Gender
Gender differences in the Gender Ideology Index are, for the most part, relatively unremarkable. For nearly all of the series men are slightly (but significantly) less egalitarian than women. This remains true. However, it is notable that the gap has now narrowed from what was nearly its widest point in 2012 to its smallest point in 2016. In addition, most of the change in the last few years is attributable to men’s “catching up” with women’s egalitarian attitudes. See Figure 3.
Gender Ideology and Generation: More Evolution than Revolution
Further analysis reveals that much of the change happens between generations – something that is particularly true in the post-stall period where individual generations show little secular trend. The fact that the Greatest Generation is fading from the survey and being replaced by Millennials after 2000, and especially since 2012, seems to be what is driving the movement toward egalitarianism. But those large differences between generations are less pronounced among the more recent cohorts: The difference between the Greatest Generation and Baby Boomers in 1977 was nearly as large as the whole change from 1977 to 2016, but the differences between Baby Boomers, GenXers, and Millennials barely as large as the overall change from 2012 to 2016. See Figure 4.
Recommended Resources:
Cotter, David A., Joan M. Hermsen, and Reeve Vanneman. 2016. “Back on Track? The Stall and Rebound in Support for Women’s New Roles in Work and Politics, 1977-2012.” research brief for the Council on Contemporary Families (https://contemporaryfamilies.org/gender-revolution-rebound-brief-back-on-track/).
Cotter, David A., Joan M. Hermsen, and Reeve Vanneman. 2011. “The End of the Gender Revolution? Attitudes from 1974 to 2008.” American Journal of Sociology. 117:1: 259-89.
Shu, Xiaoling and Kelsey D. Meagher. 2018. “Beyond the Stalled Gender Revolution: Historical and Cohort Dynamics in Gender Attitudes from 1977-2016.” Social Forces. 96:1243-1274.
April 3, 2018
[i] The General Social Survey is a nationally representative survey of the U.S. population conducted regularly (annually or biennially) since 1972. It is among the best sources for ongoing social science data on Americans’ attitudes about gender and a number of other issues. Yearly sample sizes in this analysis range from 904 in 2004 to 1,984 in 2006 (https://gssdataexplorer.norc.org/).
CCF Press Advisory: CCF Announces Nina Martin (ProPublica) as 2018 Award Recipient for Outstanding Media Coverage of Family Issues
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE – February 14, 2018
CONTACT: Christie Boxer, cboxer@adrian.edu
Council on Contemporary Families Honors Nina Martin (ProPublica) for Outstanding Media Coverage of Family Issues (2018)
Austin, TX–The Council on Contemporary Families (CCF) is pleased to present its Thirteenth Annual Media Awards at 5:30 pm on Friday, March 2nd at the DoubleTree Hotel, Austin, TX, at the CCF annual conference, “Conceiving American Families in the 21st Century: Reproductive Policies, Practices, and Technologies.”
The 2018 Award for Outstanding Media Coverage of Family Issues goes to Nina Martin for her body of work on abortion, pregnancy, and maternal health. Ms. Martin has a long history of reporting on these issues since beginning with ProPublica in 2013, including at least 45 articles, nearly half of which were published in 2016 and 2017. Her piece entitled “Nothing Protects Black Women from Dying in Pregnancy and Childbirth” is a salient example of the outstanding quality of her work. This article expertly marries the personal and specific to the national and typical, drawing the reader into the story of one woman while drawing attention to the often-overlooked plight of the whole. Another high-impact piece, “The Last Person You’d Expect to Die in Childbirth,” combines careful reporting on the staggering details of a vital issue – the U.S.’s shockingly poor record of preventing maternal mortality – with the powerful details of a heartrending story that serve to make the abstract very concrete and real, and piercing.
About the CCF Media Awards: The CCF media awards were established in 2002 as part of the Council’s commitment to enhancing the public understanding of trends in American family life. “All too often, changes in U.S. family patterns are painted in stark, better-or-worse terms that ignore the nuanced and complex realities of family life today. The Awards Committee looks for articles that put individual family issues in larger social context. This kind of coverage offers the public a balanced picture of the trade-offs, strengths and weaknesses in many different family arrangements and structures,” explained Stephanie Coontz, CCF’s Director of Research and Public Education. The CCF media awards committee will call for nominations for the 2020 awards in the fall of 2019. Please visit www.contemporaryfamilies.org for information.
The CCF media awards honor outstanding journalism that contributes to the public understanding of contemporary family issues. Honorees are invited to speak for five minutes on emerging issues affecting American families and how CCF members and supporters can help the media cover these stories effectively.
The Council on Contemporary Families’ 19th Annual Conference: “Conceiving American Families in the 21st Century: Reproductive Policies, Practices, and Technologies,” convenes leading scholars and practitioners who are experts on US reproductive health topics and reproductive rights in a global context. The conference will be held at the DoubleTree Hotel in Austin, TX, and is hosted by the University of Texas at Austin.
CCF and how CCF assists journalists: The Council on Contemporary Families is a non-profit, non-partisan organization of family researchers, mental health and social practitioners, and clinicians dedicated to providing the press and public with the latest research and best practice findings about American families. It was founded in 1996 and is based at the University of Texas at Austin.
For more information, or to receive future fact sheets and briefing papers from the Council, contact Stephanie Coontz, Director of Research and Public Education of CCF and Professor of History and Family Studies at the Evergreen State College, at coontzs@msn.com; 360-352-8117.