Publication:
‘All Else Confusion’: What Time Use Surveys Show About Changes in Gender Equity

dc.contributor.author Bittman, Michael en_US
dc.contributor.author Matheson, George en_US
dc.date.accessioned 2021-11-25T12:33:58Z
dc.date.available 2021-11-25T12:33:58Z
dc.date.issued 1996 en_US
dc.description.abstract Not so long ago most industrial societies believed that the private life of families should be organised around a division of male ‘provider’ and female ‘homemaker’. The poet, Lord Alfred Tennyson, believed only this arrangement accorded with nature and reason, and declared ‘all else confusion’. As we approach the end of the twentieth century it is clear that ‘providing’ is no longer the exclusive responsibility of men. However, opinion is divided as to whether women’s new responsibilities for paid employment will be offset by husbands’ increased responsibilities for home and family. Arlie Hochschild (1989) has complained of a ‘stalled revolution’ in men’s domestic responsibilities and warned that women are being obliged to work a ‘second shift’ after arriving home from (paid) work. At the other extreme the symmetrical family thesis assumes that women’s increasing income equality with men is part of larger process of convergence that will inevitably lead to equality in domestic responsibilities. Jonathan Gershuny’s theory of ‘lagged adaptation’ proposes a theoretical framework capable of reconciling these apparently opposed views. According to Gershuny, men’s domestic adaptation to their partner’s employment is delayed by short- and long-run processes. In this way both the ‘stalled revolution’ and the convergence of sex roles are to be expected. This paper examines the evidence for both short-run lags, using longitudinal data from the German Socio-economic Panel, and long-run lags using a cohort analysis of Australian time use data 1974-1992. While finding some support for the Gershuny theory, it concludes that women’s adaptations has been empirically the more important process. en_US
dc.identifier.isbn 0733414699 en_US
dc.identifier.issn 1447-8978 en_US
dc.identifier.uri http://hdl.handle.net/1959.4/34008
dc.language English
dc.language.iso EN en_US
dc.publisher Social Policy Research Centre, UNSW en_US
dc.relation.ispartofseries SPRC Discussion Paper en_US
dc.rights CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 en_US
dc.rights.uri https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/au/ en_US
dc.source Legacy MARC en_US
dc.title ‘All Else Confusion’: What Time Use Surveys Show About Changes in Gender Equity en_US
dc.type Working Paper en
dcterms.accessRights open access
dspace.entity.type Publication en_US
unsw.accessRights.uri https://purl.org/coar/access_right/c_abf2
unsw.identifier.doi https://doi.org/10.26190/unsworks/204
unsw.publisher.place Sydney en_US
unsw.relation.faculty Arts Design & Architecture
unsw.relation.ispartofworkingpapernumber 72 en_US
unsw.relation.originalPublicationAffiliation Bittman, Michael, Social Policy Research Centre, Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences, UNSW en_US
unsw.relation.originalPublicationAffiliation Matheson, George, Social Policy Research Centre, Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences, UNSW en_US
unsw.relation.school Social Policy Research Centre *
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