Why is there unequal division of household labour in most of the society?

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The BA (Hons) Art and Design in Education

SD377 Current Issues in Art & Design Education

Lecturer: Verdy Leung

Essay topic:

Why is there unequal division of household labour in most of the society?

By

Ho Shun Shing

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Household labour can be defined in a variety of ways, however, in this article, we acquire those employed by Shelton (1996), that is defined as unpaid work done to maintain family member and/ or a home, which, emotion work and other “invisible” types of work are typically excluded. Meanwhile, it is a job described as monotonous, fragmented, with low status not being treated as a “real” work, bring no financial remuneration, isolated with inherent time limits, and often received no recognition Oakley (Morris 1990:81).

Since mid 1960s, researches on comparing the division of household labour between men and women has been mounting, it is not only due to the great impact of household labour on the family life of contemporary married couple, but also due to its implication of gender equality in the society to certain extend. In this article, we address this issue by examining its general situation and exploring different approaches used by different sociologist to account for it. Through this process, it is hoping to find out the most comprehensive approach so as to determine whether the situation can be altered.

         A great amount of researches on the division of household labour have evidenced that women share the majority of the housework with especially the responsibility for regular, routine repetitive and childcare related housework. While for men, they are more likely to perform non-routine tasks. For instance, from Chu’s research on the household distribution between women and men in Hong Kong (1997) revealed that “wife alone” occupies the largest share in taking up the actual responsibility of all the regular housework such as foodstuff buying, meal making, dish washing and house cleaning. etc.. Whereas, husband’s involvement is limited on those irregular tasks such as car washing, bill recording and maintaining and repairing household apparatus. He also find that more than one quarter of the 230 interviewed households rely entirely on wives alone to do eight items of housework. One may doubt the situation in western countries. Would the westernized value system decrease the discrepancy in the household division of labour? This is clarified by numerous researches done in UK and US recently, which suggest that the “traditional allocation of domestic work to the woman hold firm” (Morris, 1990:86). Martin and Roberts echoed with the above conclusion by reporting that 73 percent of wives and 72 percent of husbands said that most of the wife did most or all of the housework. Though, the percent decrease when the wife is in employment, yet, majority said that wife did majority of the housework. (Abbott & Wallace, 1997).

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        From all these findings, we can conclude that the most notable characteristic of the current division of household labour is that whether employed or not, women continue to do the majority of housework. This pattern should never be ignored since as pointed out by several sociologists that the women’s rare continuous full-time careers or small labour-market participation are greatly affected by their family responsibilities especially the existence of dependent children (Abbott & Wallace, 1997). The family responsibilities born by women despite their employment status create a dual role for them and the effects have been conceptualized by Morris in terms ...

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