| Popis: |
This article describes the allocation of housework, gardening and car maintenance tasks by a sample of white married couples. The issues explored concern the impact of a wife's employment status and the employment of domestic service on the division of tasks between wives and husbands. The findings show that gender symmetry exists, wives perform ‘women's tasks’ and husbands perform ‘men's tasks’. Wives were, however, responsible for performing a greater number of tasks that needed to be performed more often and were time consuming. Dual-erner couples more commonly shared tasks and couples who did not employ domestic service were more likely to share tasks. Not all tasks were equally likely to be shared or re-allocated to a domestic worker to perform. Housework tasks were more often shared and routine tasks were more likely to be re-allocated. Overall, dual-earner couples had more flexible patterns of allocating domestic tasks. |
