writing a 3 – 5 page paper
This week we have explored the challenges women face with work-life balance. Based on class material (textbook, lecture notes and videos seen in class), students will write a 3 – 5 page paper or create a 2 – 3 minute video presentation that explores the challenges women face with work-life balance and policies and behaviours to improve the situation. Some questions to consider include:
· What are the challenges women face with work-life balance?
· Do all women experience similar work-life balance challenges?
· What are some factors creating work-life balance?
· What policies and behaviours will make it easier for women with children to have a better work-life balance.
This assignment is due November 13/20.
Option A: 3 – 5 page paper
This 3 – 5 page paper (12 font double spaced with a separate title page) must be written in an essay format and have an introduction and conclusion. All references must be listed at the end of the paper. This assignment must be based only on class material (textbook, lecture notes, and videos). Students that have information from other sources will receive a 0 grade.
The paper will be graded as follows:
Content 70 marks
Grammar, spelling, and flow 25marks
Separate title page (including name, class, title, instructor and date) 5 marks
DO NOT USE OUTSIDE SOURCE, ONLY USE THE SOURCE I PROVIDE
VIDEO: https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/2625410392
Sociology 202A
Nov 4/20
Outline
Policies supporting work-life balance
The motherload video
Policies Supporting Work–Family Reconciliation
Flexible work hours and schedules
Personal and family-related leave
Ability to refuse overtime
Supportive managers
BUT barriers to reconciliation include
Societal value placed on paid work and careers
“Flexibility stigma”
Legal decisions on “family accommodation”
e.g., Johnstone v. Canadian Border Services Agency (CBSA)
3
Copyright © 2015 Nelson Education Ltd.
Copyright © 2015 Nelson Education Ltd.
3
Video – The Motherload
https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/2625410392
What are some of the challenges facing working women?
What concepts can help explain this?
What are some policies or behaviours that can improve women’s work/life balance.
Prepared
by Karen D. Hughes, William Silver, and Harvey J. Krahn, University of Alberta
Chapter 7
Household, Family,
and Caring Work
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1) Trends: Housework, Childcare, Eldercare
2) Balancing Work and Family
3) Marketization and Outsourcing of Care
Outline
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Introduction
• Stay at home mom – Meg Luxton (1980) More than
a labour of love
• A stay at home father Andrea Doucet (2006) Do
Men Mother? Fathering, Care and Domestic
Responsibility
• Maeve Turner, a stay at home mom and lawyer
Pamela Stone (2007) Opting Out? Why women
really quit careers and head home.
• Jessica Stilwell, social worker and mom who went on
“household strike” Oct 2012
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Introduction
• ”invisible” nature of household, family and caring
work
• What gives rise to assumption that it is the mom’s
responsibility for the household and caring work.
• How does the responsibility for household and caring
work underlie or contribute to the broader gender
inequalities we observe in the labour market and paid
work
• How are employers and governments supporting
women’s and men’s changing roles as earners and
caregivers and balancing work and family life?
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2) Trends: Housework,
Childcare, Eldercare
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Conceptualizing household
and family work
• Early studies in the sociology of work didn’t look at
unpaid domestic work or caregiving
• Why???
• Location in the private realm
• Not part of the formal economy
• Household work is unpaid – lacks values
• Women’s historical and ongoing responsibility for
household work contributes to its devaluation
• Important to consider to build a more complete
picture of work
• Key to understanding women’s responsibility for the
household is the key to gender inequality
• More likely to limit women’s labour force participation
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Conceptualizing household
and family work
• Gender inequality occurs because of patriarchy and
capitalism
• Patriarchy
• male domination over women
• Describes forms of family organization in which
fathers and husbands hold the power
• Capitalism
• Incorporated earlier patriarchal social
arrangements
• Reinforces stereotypes of women
• Cheap, expendable labour
• Reserve army of labour (main job = caregiver)
• Double day of paid and unpaid work
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5.
Conceptualizing Household
and Family Work
• Domestic work, unpaid work or social reproduction
1. Housework
2. Caring and emotional work
3. Kin and community work
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Changing Family Forms
Pre-Industrial
• Before rise of capitalism – household primary site of
economic production
Early Industrialization
• Factory production and wage labour
• men (primarily) breadwinners
• Women responsible for domestic work
• Fluid Boundaries between private and public realms
• Working class – early industrialization women took in
laundry and boarders, sewed piecework “putting out”
system
• Wealthy class – hired domestic servants
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Changing family forms
• Traditional gender ideologies
• Early 20th century
• “separate spheres” ensured that household work –
women’s work
• Married women – typically did not work for $
• WWII
• Women worked in the war effort and formal
economy
• 1950s after WWII
• Women work briefly before having children
• Worked when children had grown up
• Most employers assumed women didn’t want to
work
• But…forced out by marriage or pregnancy bars
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Changing family forms
• Since the 1970s
• Moms continue working while raising their children
• Growing diversity in families
• Few single-earner families
• 2011 nearly 2/3 of all families dual-earner
• 2011 lone-parent families
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Trends in housework and caring
work
• How has the work of households changed???
• Second shift
• job outside the home was a double burden for
working women
• Reduction of leisure time (13.5 hours/week)
• Housework
• Core/regular housework
• Non-core/infrequent housework
• Convergence in time men and women spent on
housework
• Was this because men did ½ housework???
•
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Trends in household and caring
work
• Was this because men did ½ housework???
• NO!!!
• 1986
• women spent 3.3 hours/day housework
• Men spent 1.1 hours/day housework
• 2005
• Women spent 2.8 hours/day housework
• Men spent 1.5 hours/day housework
• ***averages
• Families with young children – women spend significant more
time than men on housework
• What about families with older children? Younger & educated?
Same-sex households? 13
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Trends in household and caring
work
• Childcare – important and time-consuming activities
• instrumental care or caring for (feeding, dressing
bathing)
• Expressive care or caring about (love support
encouragement)
• Fathers taking on a more active role but contemporary
norms
• Today – women who work for pay still largely
responsible for children
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Trends in household and caring
work
• Intensive mothering – women expected to devote
ever more to their children creates contradictions
for working women
• Devotion to family versus
Devotion to work
impossible!
• How do we define childcare
• Narrowing gap between men
and women
• Women still spend 2x hours on
childcare then men 16
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Trends in Eldercare
§ Population aging, and growing need for
caregivers for elderly
§ “Caregiving crunch”
§ Balancing eldercare, childcare, household
work, and paid work
§ The “sandwich generation”
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Trends in Elder care
• 2005
• 1/5 people >45
• 3 – 4 hours/week
• Women slightly more likely
• Compassionate Care benefit
• Jan 2004 – provides 8 weeks of paid leave gravely sick
family member
• Need sufficient hours of work and relationship
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Kin and Volunteer/Community Work
§ Kin work involves building and maintaining family ties.
§ Communication, ritual celebrations, exchange of
resources
§ Includes
§ Phone calls, cards, visits, e-mails, texts
§ Planning special celebrations
§ Sharing children’s clothing, tools, recipes, photos,
family history
§ Not just doing but mental work of conceiving, initiating, and organizing
such work
§ Pleasant tasks and difficult work
§ Highly gendered 19
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Volunteer Work
§ 47 percent of Canadians participated in 2010
§ 2010 Volunteered 2.1 billion hours
§ Rises with education, income, and children in
household
§ Clubs, associations, and religious and political
organizations
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Volunteer work
§ Large number work in publicly funded service
industries
§ Health, social, recreational, educational and environmental services
§ Government has cut costs – volunteers replaced paid employees in
schools, libraries
§ Includes women “opting out”
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3)
Balancing Work and Family
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Balancing Work and Family
Work has changed. Women have changed…. But
most workplaces have remained inflexible in the face
of the family demands of their workers and at home,
most men have yet to really adapt to the changes in
women. This strain between the change in women
and the absence of change in much else lead me to
speak of a ”stalled revolution.” Arlie Hochschild, The
Second Shift
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Balancing work and family
• Consequences of the stalled revolution
• Work-family conflict
• Incompatible demands arising from work and family
domains
• Role overload
• Having more role demands than one can possibly
fulfill
• Leads to conflict when there are no mechanism
(time flexibility or resources) to help people meet
their responsibilities
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Balancing Work and Family
§ Types of work–family conflict
§ Direction
§ Work-to-family conflict
§ Family-to-work conflict
§ Nature
§ Time-based conflict
§ Strain-based conflict
§ Behaviour-based conflict
§ Video Work-Life Balance
§ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_vgpibecbPo 25
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Work–Family Conflict
§ Duxbury and Higgins (2001) found high work–
family conflict linked to changing job demands
§ Downsizing and increased workloads
§ Long hours of work
§ Blurring of home and work emails, cellphones & mobile
technologies
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Consequences of Work-Family
Conflict
• Duxbury and Higgins (2001)
• Lower job satisfaction
§ Higher job stress
§ Lower levels of organizational commitment
§ Higher rates of absenteeism
§ Allen et al. (2000) reviewed 67 studies, finding
high work–family conflict linked to:
§ Reduced job and life satisfaction
§ Increased job stress
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Policies Supporting Work–Family
Reconciliation
§ Flexible work hours and schedules
§ Personal and family-related leave
§ Ability to refuse overtime
§ Supportive managers
§ BUT barriers to reconciliation include
§ Societal value placed on paid work and careers
§ “Flexibility stigma”
§ Legal decisions on “family accommodation”
§ e.g., Johnstone v. Canadian Border Services Agency
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‘ ‘
“When I think about what I do every day-1 cook meals for my family, I make cereal for
breakfast and sandwiches for lunch and meat and potatoes for supper. Nothing unusual
about that. But when I think about all those thousands of other women all doing the same
thing, then I realize I’m not just making porridge. I’m part of a whole army of women who
are feeding the country.”
Source: Stay-at-home mother. Meg Luxton. (1980). More than a Labour of Love. Women’s Press, p. 13.
“There are times when I go insane. There are times when I think the demands of the home are
too much, the responsibilities and the constant nagging and the whining of the kids and the
diapers and the crap …. Sometimes I think, By God, my life would be a lot less complicated if
I just had a nine-to-five job …. But there are other times-just being with them in the summer,
being in the backyard, colouring or doing puzzles or hanging out with them, just playing
squirt -gun games for an entire hour-that are just great. There is nothing that can replace that.”
Source: Tom, stay-at-home father. Andrea Doucet. (2006). Do Men Mother? Fathering, Care and
Domestic Responsibility. University of Toronto Press, p. 3-4.
“You know the first question they always ask you is, ‘Well, what do you do? Where do you
work?’ And I say, ‘Well I’m not working now. I’m staying home with my children.’ And it
was like this wall of invisibility. You know, I remember reading The Invisible Man by Ralph
Ellison …. And that was what came to mind. It was like all of a sudden I didn’t exist. If I didn’t
have an identity in the working world, I didn’t exist.”
Source: Maeve Turner, stay-at-home mom and lawyer. Pamela Stone. (2007). Opting Out? Why
Women Really Quit Careers and Head Home. University of California Press, p. 145.
INTRODUCTION
In October 2012, Jessica Stilwell, a social worker and mother living in
Calgary, made national and international headlines when she went on a
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“household strike,” refusing to clean up after her two 12-year-old twin
daughters and their younger 10-year-old sister. Frustrated by their unwilling-
ness to pick up after themselves and pitch in with daily household chores,
Stilwell reduced her housework to the bare minimum, cooking meals and
packing school lunches. Everything else, from washing her children’s dirty
dishes, to picking up their toys, games, and clothes, to unpacking their
school lunch bags, was left to her daughters. She did not remind or nag
them about what needed to be done; in fact, she did not even tell them she
was going on strike she simply quit cleaning up after them. Six days later,
her house in disarray, with dirty dishes overflowing from the dishwasher,
unpacked lunch bags fermenting on the kitchen counter, and clothes, jackets,
toys, and games strewn about, her children called a truce, apologizing for not
doing more. They then spent two frenzied days cleaning and returning the
house to its original pristine condition, serving coffee to their mother while
she watched them work.1
Such examples highlight the important, but often taken-for-granted and
“invisible” nature of household, family, and caring work. In this chapter,
we examine this work, exploring the skills and demands involved, and
how participation in and responsibility for such work is distributed among
family members. We also consider how families accomplish household and
caring work in a context where women have increased their attachment to
paid work, but where traditional ideas about gender and household respon-
sibility persist. What is striking, for instance, about media coverage on
Jessica Stilwell’s strike is the sole focus on her as a mother. Her husband and
the father of her daughters, who lives in the same household, merits just a
passing mention, and it seems to be assumed that the work of organizing
the household naturally belongs to her. What gives rise to such assumptions?
And to what extent are gendered patterns of household and caring work
really shifting? Moreover, how does responsibility for household and caring
work underlie or contribute to the broader gender inequalities we observe
in the labour market and paid work? We examine these questions while
considering how employers and governments are supporting women’s and
men’s changing roles as earners and caregivers, and their efforts to balance
work and family life.
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HOUSEHOLDS, FAMILIES, AND WORK
Conceptualizing Household and Family Work
Most early studies in the sociology of work paid scant, if any attention to
household work, unpaid work, or caregiving. In her article “Invisible Work,”
sociologist Arlene Kaplan Daniels suggests several reasons for this. First, to
the extent that caring and housework are done in the private realm, they are
often seen as falling outside the formal economy, thus lacking economic value.
Second, the fact that household work is unpaid that it does not receive a
salary or wage reinforces common perspectives that it lacks value, as it is
not readily thought of in dollar terms. Finally, according to Daniels, women’s
historical and ongoing responsibility for household work further contributes
to its devaluation. Rather than being seen as skilled work requiring knowledge
and ability, caring and cleaning are seen as something women “naturally” do.
Illustrating this, Daniels asks how many people consider the following to be
work: comforting a child, cooking meals, creating warm and caring family
relations. Certainly, she contends, such activities are work, but traditional
ideas about family and gender impede this recognition.
Today, while some Canadians continue to hold the views described by
Daniels, there is also growing awareness of the importance of household
and caring work. Sociologists, in particular, have increasingly focused on the
household as an important site of research and study. Not only does such
research help us build a more complete picture of work, but it also helps us
understand the fluid boundary between the labour market and household.
Equally important, given that women still carry much of the responsibility
for families, a sharper picture of household work is key to understanding the
nature of the gender inequality we observe in Canada and other countries.
Typically, household responsibilities are far more likely to limit women’s labour
force participation, keeping women financially dependent on their partners.
Some experts argue that gender inequality is the result of two systems
of domination: capitalism and patriarchy. Broadly speaking, patriarchy refers
to male domination over women, but more specifically it describes forms
of family organization in which fathers and husbands hold the power.2
Capitalism incorporated earlier patriarchal social arrangements. Remnants of
patriarchy still reinforce stereotypes of women as cheap, expendable labour.
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Women’s traditional roles as mothers and partners also restrict their economic
opportunities and, for those who are employed, create a double day of paid
and unpaid work.
In delving into the work of households, researchers have identified and
shed light on a wide variety of work, including housework (e.g., cooking,
cleaning, laundry), caring and emotion work (e.g., bearing and raising children,
caring for the elderly and infirm), and kin and community work (e.g., commu-
nicating and coordinating with larger family networks and neighbours). Taken
together, such activities have often been referred to as domestic work, unpaid
work, or social reproduction (as opposed to production which occurs in the
formal economy). Laslett and Brenner (1989: 382) define social reproduction
as activities “involved in the maintenance of life on a daily basis, and inter-
generationally.” Such work is organized and accomplished through “family
strategies” or decisions made by families about the nature of family life (e.g.,
size of family) and the division of labour in the home and labour market. As
we will see, the work of households is also shaped both by economic realities
and dominant cultural ideals about how family life should be.
Changing Family Forms
We have already outlined in previous chapters the important role of house-
holds and families in Canada’s economic development. But the specific nature
of that role has changed and shifted over time. Before the rise of capitalism
and industrialization, the household operated as a primary site of economic
production with men, women, and children working together to sustain
family life (Cohen 1988). The emergence of factory production and a wage-
labour economy shifted the role of the household again, as men (primarily)
were drawn into paid jobs in the labour market, leaving women responsible
for a wide range of work in the home from cooking and cleaning, to caring
for children, the elderly, and the infirm.
Although we tend to think of families and households as part of the pri-
vate realm, standing apart from the market and economy, the household was
a site for paid work, though often at the margins of the informal economy.
In early industrializing Canada, for example, working-class women often took
in laundry or boarders to earn extra money for their families (Bradbury 1993).
Women also sewed piecework at home as part of factory-based “putting out”
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systems. At the other end of the economic spectrum, families with resources
hired domestic servants to cook and clean, bringing employment relationships
into the home. Boundaries between the household and market, and private
and public realms, were therefore fluid and not always clearly demarcated a
situation that persists today.
Traditional gender ideologies, especially the idea of”separate spheres,” also
played an important role, ensuring that household work remained culturally
and materially associated with women. Typically, married women and mothers
did not work for pay, except in cases of dire economic need. At certain points
in the 20th century, these gender norms relaxed for example, during World
War II when women were drawn into the war effort and formal economy
(Pierson 1986). But such moments were fleeting. Mter World War II, a return
to breadwinner norms meant that the most common pattern was for women
to work briefly before having children, stay home to raise them, and then
return to the labour force in middle age after the children had grown up. 3
Because most mothers in the 1950s responded to the demands of child rearing
by leaving the labour force, employers tended to assume women had a weak
attachment to paid work. Yet, while some women did leave voluntarily, others
did not. Instead, they were forced out by marriage or pregnancy bars formal
policies and informal practices that required women to resign their jobs upon
marriage or motherhood (Sangster 1995, 2010).4
Since the 1970s, there has been a pervasive trend in Canada and other
industrialized nations for mothers to continue working while raising their
children, and this group accounts for most of the increase in labour market
participation in recent decades. Looking back to Figures 3.3 and 6.1 reminds
us of how dramatic this change has been. Today, far fewer women leave the
labour force when they have children, and those who “take time out” do so for
a much shorter time. Growing numbers of women are now juggling paid work
with family roles, and the traditional single-earner family has been eclipsed. In
2011, for instance, most Canadian families were dual-earner, accounting for
nearly two-thirds (62.8o/o) of all families (see Statistics Canada, CANSIM,
Table 111-0020). In comparison, single-earner families comprised just one-
quarter of all families with single female-earner and single male-earner
families making up 7.9 percent and 17.2 percent of all families, respectively.
Lone-parent families made up the remainder (12.2o/o of all families), and
roughly 80 percent of these were headed by women (Milan et al. 2011: 12).5
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In short, there is growing diversity in families, and the traditional breadwinner
family (where a working male earns the sole wage) is no longer the norm.
TRENDS IN HOUSEHOLD AND CARING WORK
Given these dramatic changes, especially women’s growing role as earners,
how has the work of households changed? Is there now more sharing of
unpaid work among family members, or do traditional patterns persist?
Evidence from early time budget studies, which ask people to detail their use of
time, suggests that despite change, many working women are still responsible
for what U.S. sociologist Arlie Hochschild calls a “second shift” in the home.6
After working seven or eight hours on the job, they come home to cook,
clean, shop, and look after children the same domestic work their mothers
and grandmothers did as full-time housewives. Hochschild’s findings in her
classic 1989 study, The Second Shift, echo those of earlier Canadian research:
Martin Meissner and colleagues (1975) found that a job outside the home
meant a double burden for working women and a decrease of 13.5 hours per
week in leisure time.
But perhaps these early studies reflect a time period when families had not
yet adjusted to the new realities of working women. If so, are new generations
redefining how household work is done? Media stories and television often
give the impression that men are doing more cooking and cleaning; however,
do recent studies confirm this?7
Housework
To answer these questions we can draw on time-use data generated from self-
reported responses to survey questions or diaries, as well as qualitative infor-
mation from individual- or couple-level interviews or observation. Studies
of housework typically distinguish between core/regular housework, such as
meal preparation, meal cleanup, indoor cleaning, and laundry that are done
daily; and non-core/infrequent housework, such as outdoor cleaning, interior
or exterior maintenance, and repairs (Marshall 2006: 2). Note that house-
work is measured separately from childcare even though both tasks may be
done at the same time and the amount of housework is strongly shaped by
the presence and age of children. An important distinction can also be made
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between the time spent on activities and who carries responsibility that is,
planning and anticipating household work, rather than simply carrying it out.
Concerning the extent of change, Kan, Sullivan, and Gershuny (2011)
compare time-use trends in housework from the 1960s to the present for
16 different countries (including Canada). They find evidence of convergence
in the time women and men spent on housework, but note that the gap is
narrowing largely due to reductions in women’s housework, with much smaller
increases in the time contributions of men. Casting a glance over more detailed
Canadian data confirms and helps to unpack this dynamic. Using Statistics
Canada’s General Social Survey (GSS), we can compare participation and time
use in housework for Canadian households for 1986, 1992, 1998, and 2005.
Trends for the 1990s8 confirm that women in dual-earner families still hold pri-
mary responsibility for housework (defined in the GSS as meal preparation and
cleanup, cleaning, and laundry). Comparing the mid-1980s to the mid-2000s,
however, suggests change. More men participated in housework by the mid-
2000s three-quarters (71 o/o) reported they had contributed to housework in
2005, compared to just over half (54o/o) in 1986. But they increased the time
they spent on housework only slightly, from 1.1 hours in 1986 to 1.5 hours per
day by 2005. In comparison, women reduced the time they spent on house-
work, from 3.3 hours per day in 1986 to 2.8 hours per day by 2005. Taken
together, these studies suggest that men are becoming more involved, but in
time-limited ways, while women continue to hold domestic responsibility.9
Of course, these figures reflect averages, whereas contributions may
vary by family type, age/generation, ethnicity, sexuality, gender attitudes,
and other factors. Indeed, in Canadian families with very young children,
women spend significantly more time than men on housework. But this gap
narrows dramatically as children grow older, suggesting a family life-cycle
effect (Milan, Keown, and Urquijo 2011: 22). Generation and age also matter,
with younger and university-educated couples favouring less traditional
patterns (Marshall 2011). More egalitarian patterns in time use and domestic
responsibility are also found in same-sex households according to studies in
Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom (Dunne 1996; Nelson
1996; Sullivan 1996). Single parenthood, gender ideologies, and women’s
relative earnings also influence time spent on household tasks and how these
are divided. At a more institutional and societal level, research suggests that
countries with high levels of female employment, and childhood exposure to
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maternal employment, have higher contributions to household work by men
(Cunningham 2007; Hook 2006; Gupta 2006).
Family income and resources also play a critical role in shaping how
household work is done. Trends in “assortative mating” (where people of
similar class backgrounds partner) mean that households are increasingly
advantaged or disadvantaged (England 2010). For working-class families, the
challenge is juggling household work alongside the demands of precarious,
low-paying work, which may have erratic schedules (Presser 2003). In con-
trast, professional dual-career families are often time strapped, as are those in
two-person careers (e.g., elite CEOs who are expected to have the unpaid ser-
vices of a wife who can put on dinner parties, plan social events and travel, and
organize household moves). Such dynamics often see well-resourced families
outsourcing family work an issue we return to shortly.
Childcare, Mothering, and Fathering
Caring for children is one of the most important and time-intensive activi-
ties in family life, involving both instrumental care or caring for (e.g., feeding,
dressing, bathing) and expressive care or caring about (e.g., love, support,
encouragement). Studies suggest that fathers have taken on an increasingly
active role as caregivers, though the extent and nature of this change is
debated. 10 In a fascinating study, Andrea Doucet (2006) examines a seemingly
simple question posed in the title of her book Do Men Mother? showing
the complexity of mothering and fathering, and the challenges for stay-at-
home fathers who engage in household and caring work that has strong
cultural associations with women. Traditionally, women have carried the
responsibility of caring for children, leading scholars to argue that they engage
in an “ethic of care,” specific maternal practices, and “maternal thinking,”
which is attuned to the needs of children and family life (Ruddick 1995;
Tronto 1993; Held 2006). Even today, when women increasingly work for
pay, caring for children largely remains their responsibility. Contemporary
norms around intensive mothering, where women are expected to devote
ever more of their attention, effort, and identity to their children, create
sharp contradictions for working mothers who carry far more economic and
workplace responsibilities than ever before (Hays 1996; Stone 2007). In her
insightful study Competing Devotions Mary Blair-Loy (2003) suggests
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that competing moral schemas “devotion to family” versus “devotion to
work” set up cultural expectations for professional working women that are
impossible to fulfill.
What do recent studies show us with respect to involvement and respon-
sibility for childcare? Studies typically define childcare as feeding, dressing,
helping, reading to, talking or playing with, medical care, and related travel,
such as taking children to school or sports activities (Marshall 2006: 2).
Overall, time-use studies suggest a narrowing of the gap in the time spent by
women and men in caring for children, as mothers have increased their hours
in paid employment, and fathers in many countries have taken a more active
role in their children’s lives (Beaujot 2000; Beaujot, Liu, and Ravanera 2008;
Bianchi and Milkie 2010; Hook 2006; Marshall 2006, 2011). Despite signs
of change, however, there is still a significant, and persistent, gender gap, with
mothers devoting more time to daily direct care and assuming the bulk of
responsibility for planning and coordinating caring work. Indeed, the analysis
of time use by Kan and colleagues (2011), which considered 16 countries
(including Canada) from the 1960s to the present, suggests low levels of
change in childcare patterns, with women still assuming the bulk of time
involved in children’s care.
In Canada, data gathered from Statistics Canada’s Labour Force Survey
(LFS) and the General Social Survey (GSS) offer further detail on the time spent
caring for children (Marshall 2006). What is striking across all family types is the
enduring, persistent link between women and childcare. On average, mothers
spend roughly twice as much time caring for children than fathers: 2.05 hours
for every hour by men. As shown in Figure 7.1, Canadian mothers spent, on
average, 50.1 hours each week caring for children, compared to 24.4 hours
reported by fathers (Milan et al. 20 11: 20). Since this average mixes different
family types, it is important to look at more specific employment and family
situations. Comparing single-earner, dual-earner, and lone-parent families, for
instance, we see the gender gap is largest in single-earner families, two hours
for women for every hour by men. Yet, interestingly, the gender gap within
dual-earner families is narrower when one partner works part time (1.47 hours
for women for every hour by men) than it is for full-time, dual-earner families
(1.83 hours). Not surprisingly, mothers of young children (four years old or
less) devote the most time to care. Here, the gender gap is largest (2.23 hours
for women for every hour by men), falling notably for older children. Amid
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FIGURE 7.1 Time Spent on Unpaid Childcare by Working Arrangement and
Age of Youngest Child, Canada, 2010
All women and men
Dual earner couple, respondent working full time
Dual earner couple, respondent working part time
Single earner couple, respondent working
Lone parents, respondent working
Youngest child, aged 0-4
Youngest child, aged rr 14
Men
12.0
Women
24.4
212
25.5
26.9
30.2
19.7
37.7
50.1
49.8
59.4
50.8
615
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80
Average number of hours per week
Source: Adapted from Milan, Anne, Leslie-Anne Keown, and Covadonga Robles Urquijo (2011 ). “Families, Living
Arrangements, and Unpaid Work,” Women in Canada: A Gender-Based Statistical Report. Ottawa: Statistics Canada. Catalogue
No. 89-503-X, 2011, p. 20.
women’s continued responsibility for children, especially at a young age, there
is a growing trend toward more “involved fathering” a pattern documented in
qualitative studies, as well (Doucet 2006; Ball and Daly 2012).
Eldercare
Caring for elderly parents and relatives is another important part of house-
hold work. Population aging (discussed in Chapter 3) has significant implica-
tions for the future, especially for women who often carry responsibility for
eldercare. From a policy standpoint, eldercare is seen as a pressing issue in
Canada and many other industrialized countries, and there are predictions
of a “caregiving crunch” as fewer women can meet such demands because of
their own jobs. 11 The 2007 General Social Survey (GSS) showed that roughly
2. 7 million or one in five Canadians 45 years old and over provided care
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to a senior, most typically a parent. Many of these caregivers were part of the
“sandwich generation,” juggling eldercare with caring for their own children.
In 2007, three out of four caregivers were married, and nearly half were young
enough (ages 45-54) to still be caring for their own children. Well over half
(57o/o) also worked in a paid job.
What is involved in providing eldercare? According to the 2012 General
Social Survey (GSS), those helping an elderly parent or in-law spent between
three and four hours, on average, each week. Of note, a small minority (about
7o/o) put in the equivalent of a full-time job with 30 hours or more of care-
giving each week. Typically, the main reason for providing care to a parent,
parent-in-law, or grandparent was aging and frailty, followed by specific
medical conditions, such as dementia, cancer, and cardiovascular disease. The
most common forms of care involved phoning and visiting (reported by 99o/o)
and offering emotional support (reported by 92o/o), followed by transportation
(reported by 41 o/o) and meals and cleaning (reported by 37o/o). Women were
slightly more likely than men to provide care to aging family members and
were also at greater risk of reporting psychological distress or health impacts as
a result. 12 Overall, about 60 percent of those caring for parents felt worried or
distressed by their responsibilities, and about one-third had an elevated level
of psychological distress (Turcotte 20 13: 6-12).
Recognizing the growing demands of eldercare, the federal government
introduced Compassionate Care benefits in January 2004, which provides eight
weeks of paid leave to care for a gravely ill family member. This develop-
ment is important but, similar to other employment-related benefits, many
individuals are ineligible due to the types of caregiver relationships involved
or insufficient employment-related hours and earnings. Since introducing
this leave, the federal government has expanded the eligibility criteria to
recognize a wider range of situations and caregivers (HRSDC 2007). Recent
evaluations, however, suggest additional changes are needed (see, for example,
Williams et al. 20 1 0).
Kin and Volunteer/Community Work
Two other important types of household work occur across and beyond
households.
Kin work describes a wide range of work that goes into building and
maintaining family ties, through communication, ritual celebrations, and
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the exchange of resources (di Leonardo 1987). Examples of kin work include
regular or periodic phone calls, cards, and visits, as well as e-mails, texts, or
Facebook posts, to share family news. Special celebrations such as birthdays,
Thanksgiving, or other seasonal, religious, and secular holidays are also
important, creating shared family bonds, traditions, and memories. Exchanging
resources is also a part of kin work for example, sharing children’s clothing,
toys, tools, recipes, photos, and family history.
Kin work, like domestic work, involves not only the doing but also the
mental work of conceiving, initiating, and organizing such work. It may
involve pleasant tasks, such as organizing a family reunion or birthday, or
difficult work, such as helping family members patch up a dispute. Studies
suggest kin work is important because it fulfills deeply held cultural expecta-
tions of a satisfying family life (di Leonardo 1987). Typically, it falls to women,
even when it does not involve their side of the family (e.g., in-laws or distant
relatives on their partner’s side). In her study of kin work, di Leonardo (1987)
found it involved extensive knowledge and skill, and thus was not easily “out-
sourced” or passed along to others. Given this, women may often cut back on
kin work during times of competing demands or stress.
Equally, volunteer work is an important form of work often overlooked if
we rely only on official labour force statistics. According to the 2010 Canada
Survey on Giving, Volunteering and Participation (CSGVP), 47 percent of
Canadians ages 15 and over (or 13.2 million individuals) contributed time
and energy to volunteer activities in 2010 (Vezina and Crompton 2012). This
rate of volunteering was up just slightly, from 45 percent in 2004. Canadians
volunteered about 2.1 billion hours in 2010, equivalent to nearly 1.1 million
full-time jobs. Between 2004 and 2010, the average number of hours that
each volunteer contributed declined slightly (168 hours to 156 hours, respec-
tively). A minority of volunteers account for most of these volunteer hours,
with the top 10 percent of volunteers contributing 53 percent of total hours.
Participation in volunteer work rises with education and income level, and
with the presence of children in the household. 13
Volunteer workers are found in a wide variety of clubs and associations, as
well as in religious and political organizations. However, a very large number
work in the publicly funded service industries, assisting in the provision of
health, social, recreational, educational, environmental, and other types of
services. In recent years, as governments at all levels have cut costs, volunteers
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have increasingly replaced paid employees in schools, for instance, where
parent-volunteers play a growing role, helping in libraries, in classrooms, and
on field trips. As this trend continues, volunteer work will become an ever
greater part of the unpaid work performed by Canadians. In her study, Opting
Out?, Pamela Stone (2007) found that women forced to exit demanding pro-
fessions, in order to raise their families, often pursued volunteer work in order
to maintain adult connections, overcome isolation at home, and retain a sense
of professional identity.
BALANCING WORK AND FAMILY
Over 25 years ago in her classic study, The Second Shift, U.S. sociologist Arlie
Hochschild observed:
Work has changed. Women have changed …. But most workplaces
have remained inflexible in the face of the family demands of their
workers and at home, most men have yet to really adapt to the
changes in women. This strain between the change in women and
the absence of change in much else leads me to speak of a “stalled
revolution.” 14
Today researchers continue to puzzle over the “stalled revolution” (England
2010; Doucet 2006), trying to understand why there has been such a slow
pace of change in efforts to reconcile work and family life (Correll et al. 2014;
Pocock 2003; J. Williams 2010; Williams and Dempsey 2014).
Work-Family Conflict
One consequence of the stalled revolution is the rise of work-family conflict
and role overload. Work-family conflict involves mutually incompatible
demands arising from work and family domains ( Greenhaus and Beutel!
1985: 77). Role overload involves having more role demands than one can
possibly fulfill (Coverman 1989). While some researchers use these terms
interchangeably, others view them as distinct, noting that overload leads to
conflict only when there are no mechanisms (e.g., resources or time flex-
ibility) to help people meet their responsibilities. For example, having extra
income allows families to buy in household help or time-saving conveniences.
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Researchers also make distinctions based on the directionality of conflict.15
Work-to-family conflict occurs when workplace demands interfere with family
needs for instance, a parent missing a family birthday because of a meeting
or an evening shift. Family-to-work conflict occurs when family interferes with
work for example, a child’s illness preventing a parent from being at work.
Distinctions can also be made by the perceived nature of conflict. Time-
based conflict is by far the most commonly studied type of conflict, arising
when it is physically impossible to meet the time demands of different roles
(e.g., official work hours prevent a parent from dropping off or picking up a
child at school). Strain-based conflict focuses on the physical, mental, and emo-
tional fatigue attached to meeting competing work and family demands for
example, lacking the energy to play with one’s children, or help with home-
work, when one gets home from work. Finally, behaviour-based conflict occurs
when work and family behaviours are incompatible. For instance, managers
and supervisors who act in an authoritarian, commanding manner at work
may experience difficulties at home in caring for young children who need
emotional warmth, connection, and flexibility.
How common is work-family conflict? Empirical studies suggest that it
affects a significant proportion of the workforce in Canada, the United States,
and other industrialized countries. Prevalence rates vary, however, depending
on occupational roles, workplace demands, and family composition. 16 In
Canada, three large-scale surveys conducted by Duxbury and Higgins The
National Study on Balancing Work and Caregiving in Canada track trends
in 1991, 2001, and 2011. 17 Overall, the Duxbury and Higgins studies confirm
that role overload and work-family conflict are significant issues for the working
population in Canada. In 1991, nearly one-half of respondents (47o/o)
reported high levels of role overload, while over one-quarter (28o/o) reported
high levels of work-to-family conflict. Rates of high family-to-work conflict
were much lower, with just 5 percent of respondents reporting this (Duxbury
and Higgins 2001: 14). In 2001, there was a notable jump in rates, with
59 percent of respondents reporting high role overload, 31 percent reporting
high levels of work-to-family conflict, and 10 percent reporting high family-
to-work conflict.
Duxbury and Higgins attribute rising levels of work-family conflict
in 1991-2001 to changing work demands, in particular, downsizing and
increased workloads; organizational norms requiring long hours; and the
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growing use of email, cellphones, and mobile technologies that blur bound-
aries between work and home (Duxbury and Higgins 2001: 14). With respect
to rising family-to-work conflict, the authors point to population aging and
the increased prevalence of juggling both child-care and elder-care responsibil-
ities. More recent 2011 survey results suggest reduced, though still high, levels
of conflict and overload. Overall, 40 percent of Canadians reported high role
overload, and 30 percent reported high levels of work-to-family conflict. Of
note, rising proportion of respondents (15o/o) reported high levels of family-
to-work conflict up from 5 percent in 1991 (Duxbury and Higgins 2012: 13).
Consequences of Work-Family Conflict
Work-family conflict has many negative outcomes for individuals and their
families. 18 In Canada, Duxbury and Higgins (2001) compared employees
with high and low work-to-family conflict, finding a 40 percent gap in job
satisfaction, with just 20 percent of those with high work-to-family conflict
reporting high job satisfaction, compared to 60 percent of those where work-
to family conflict was low. Outcomes for job stress were especially striking,
with 57 percent of those with high work-to-family conflict reporting high job
stress, compared to just 9 percent of employees where work-to-family conflict
was low. Looking at a range of countries, Kossek and Ozeki (1998) reviewed
50 studies that examined job satisfaction and/ or life satisfaction, concluding
there was clear evidence of a “negative relationship between all types of work-
family conflict and job and life satisfaction” (145). In their meta-analysis of
67 studies, Allen and colleagues (2000) also found strong links between high
work-family conflict and reduced job satisfaction, reduced life satisfaction,
and higher stress.
Pressures created by work-family imbalance have costs not only for
employees and families, but for employers too. As Linda Duxbury and Higgins
(200 1) found, employees with high work-family conflict have lower levels of
organizational commitment and higher rates of absenteeism. Indeed, absen-
teeism is a significant source of lost productivity for employers. According to
Statistics Canada, female rates of absenteeism have risen steadily since the late
1970s, mainly due to family or personal obligations as growing numbers of
mothers with preschool children sought employment. For example, in 2011,
employed women lost an average of 11.4 days, compared to 7.7 for men, due
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to illness, disability, or personal and family responsibilities (Dabboussy and
Uppal 2012). While some employers are working to support family-friendly
work environments, firms in the most dynamic sectors of the economy are
often defined by heavy workloads and long hours. This culture is not sustain-
able, however. It may suit younger, single workers who have no dependents,
but lack of attention to work-life balance issues will cause problems (e.g., high
turnover) as workers move into their 30s, find life partners, and begin raising
children. Not surprisingly, studies are increasingly exploring the problems gen-
erated by “greedy organizations” (Coser 1967) and the culture of long work
hours (Burke and Cooper 2008; Correll et al. 2014; J. Williams 2010).
Policies Supporting Work-Family Reconciliation
What types of policies and supports help individuals reconcile their work,
family, and personal responsibilities? Research suggests that flexible work hours
and schedules, generous personal and family-related leave, the ability to
refuse overtime, and the presence of supportive managers are all important
(Duxbury and Higgins 2001; Duxbury, Higgins, and Schroder 2009; Lowe
2007; Hill et al. 2006). Slowly, in part due to studies such as these, height-
ened awareness of the economic and individual costs of work-family conflict
is challenging employers to reconsider some long-standing policies. Yet many
employers remain locked into a traditional 9 to 5, five-days-a-week schedule
(Correll et al. 2014). Many workers do not have flexibility in the hours and
location of their work. Many also lack extended employer-sponsored coverage
for paid parental or elder-care leave (beyond standard government-provisioned
leaves), or may be unable to take full advantage of such policies due to insuf-
ficient earnings or hours. 19
All in all, we have documented what Hochschild called a “stalled revolu-
tion.” Well over two decades ago, the Conference Board predicted that more
employers would respond to these needs as the drain on productivity became
more visible and employee pressure for such policies mounted (Paris 1989).
Unfortunately for many working parents, there is little tangible sign of this hap-
pening, something Duxbury and Higgins (2012) show in the key findings for
their most recent study. As Figure 7.2 shows, many employees (both women and
men) still have quite limited flexibility, finding it difficult to work from home for
part of the day, or to be home to meet their children, or to pick them up after
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FIGURE 7.2 Flexible Workplace Options, Canada, 2011
Spend some of the
day working from home
Be home when children
get home from school
Vary work hours
(arrival/departure)
Arrange work schedule to
meet family responsibilities
Interrupt workday to deal
with personal/family needs
Take paid day off when
needed by elderly relative
Take holidays
at time desired
Take paid day off
when child is sick
Men Women
20
22
36
38
36
38
30
35
29
34
26
31
63
62
69
71
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100
% who find it difficult to …
Source: Adapted from Duxbury, Linda, and Christopher Higgins (2012) Key Findings: Revisiting Work-Life Issues in Canada’-
The 2011-12 National Study on Balancing Work and Caregiving in Canada, p. 17.
school. Roughly one-third of workers have little control over their work sched-
ules, being unable to vary arrival and departure times, control the time of their
specific shifts or overtime, interrupt and return to work in the case of family
emergencies, or take a paid day off to help sick children or elderly relatives.
Moreover, employees who have flexible work arrangements, and make
use of them, may still find these arrangements do not always help to reduce
the stresses of balancing job and family. Mter examining a variety of alterna-
tive work arrangements, Janet Fast and Judith Frederick (1996) concluded
that self-employment, flex-place (working some hours at home), and shift
work had no effect on workers’ perceived time stress. Both women and men
in part-time jobs were less stressed about time than full-timers, however,
although far more women than men chose part-time work for family-related
reasons. Flextime (employees choosing when their work day starts and stops)
helped to reduce time pressures, but was less available to women than to men.
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Compressed workweeks (fewer days per week with longer hours each day)
seemed to increase women’s level of time stress, likely because they interfered
with family routines. Job sharing was not examined by Fast and Frederick
(1996), but other studies suggest it may contribute to reduced time pressure
and better integration of work and family (Marshall 1997).
More recent research also confirms the benefits of limiting hours. For
instance, in a study of the “60-hour dual-earner workweek” (where both part-
ners limit employment to 30 hours), Hill and his colleagues (2006) found that
individuals experienced lower levels of work-family conflict and enhanced
family satisfaction and work-family fit. 20
Barriers to achieving work-family balance, however, are numerous and
complex. Arlie Hochschild’s (1997) research suggests that even in organiza-
tions that provide family-friendly policies and programs, employees may
experience difficulties finding enough time for their families. One of the
largest barriers is the fact that society places great value, and confers rewards,
on people who are successful in their careers. The result, especially among
professionals and managers, is that employees spend more, not less, time at
work. As Hochschild (1997: 198-99) suggests, “in a cultural contest between
work and home, working parents are voting with their feet, and the workplace
is winning.” Research by Williams, Blair-Loy, and Berdahl (2013) suggests
reasons why this may be the case. In taking advantage of flexible workplace
arrangements, mothers and fathers appear to experience a “flexibility stigma”
that has an impact on their careers and future opportunities. Given this, many
are understandably reluctant to take advantage of such options.
Yet, emerging legal decisions on “family accommodation” in Canada and
the United States suggest that employers may increasingly need to consider
how their working hours and traditional practices affect working parents.
In their article “Will Working Mothers Take Your Company to Court?”
U.S. legal scholar Joan Williams and Amy Cuddy (2012) outline recent U.S.
rulings that require companies to consider the impact of their work hours and
location on parents, and make accommodations where possible. Likewise, in
Canada, the case of Johnstone v. Canadian Border Services Agency (CBSA) saw
the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal rule that the CBSA had engaged in
“family status” discrimination when it refused Fiona Johnstone’s request for a
static schedule rather than an irregular day/ night schedule that changed every
six weeks, making it impossible for her to find reliable childcare. 21 Evidence
presented showed the CBSA could have easily accommodated Johnstone’s
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request, as they had done for other employees, and Johnstone was therefore
awarded damages. If emerging legal decisions support this direction of change,
then employers will need to ensure reasonable working hours, shifts, and
schedules for working parents where feasible.
Early Childhood Education and Care
Of all types of support, quality childcare is perhaps the most pressing need.
According to the 2008 report, Early Childhood Education and Care in Canada
(Beach et al. 2009), child-care arrangements present an ongoing problem
for many parents in Canada although preferences for different forms of
childcare (e.g., family, informal, formal) vary widely (Beaujot 1997; Statistics
Canada 2004a). Despite past promises by Canadian governments to improve
child-care availability, the number of licensed child-care spaces by no means
fills the need. By 2008, for example, there were 876,194 regulated child-care
spaces (for children up to 12 years old) across Canada, up from 373,741 in
1992 (Friendly and Beach 2005; Beach et al. 2009). This figure represents
a near tripling of available spaces, a positive change given the historical heel
dragging that has accompanied the promise of a national daycare program
(Timpson 2001). But even with this increase, regulated child-care spaces still
only accommodate a small fraction of what is needed.
Several challenges are commonly identified in empirical studies of child-
care with respect to availability, cost, and quality. With respect to availability,
in Canada the Childcare Resource and Research Unit (CRRU) has produced
regular reports on provincial trends in childcare provision. Their most recent
reports, analyzing trends to 2012, highlight ongoing shortages of child-care
spots (Friendly et al. 2013). Nationally, in 2012, regulated full-time or part-
time child-care spaces were available for just 22.5 percent of children five
and under who required care because their parents were working. Though
up from 14.9 percent in 2001, this percentage still falls well short of what is
needed, given that nearly three-quarters of mothers with preschool children
are employed. Care shortages are equally pronounced for older, school-aged
children, with regulated spaces available for just 20.5 percent of children up
to age 12. With respect to cost, average full-time fees vary widely, from a high
in Ontario of $1,150/month (for infants) and $925/month (for toddlers),
to a low of $152 per month for infant and toddler care in Quebec’s publicly
subsidized system.
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So far, Quebec is the only jurisdiction in Canada to make a concerted
effort to address these issues: in 1997, it introduced a comprehensive pro-
gram of universal subsidized daycare and early childhood education (Albanese
2006). Despite further change to existing programs (including an increase in
cost from $5 per day to $7 per day for childcare), Quebec remains a leader in
child-care access, offering regulated spaces to over 37 percent of children up to
age 12 (Friendly et al. 2013: 55).22 Still, even with such changes, finding high-
quality, accessible childcare remains a significant challenge for most working
parents. Given the high costs and low availability of spaces, many children of
working parents are looked after informally by sitters, neighbours, nannies, or
relatives (Statistics Canada 2004a: 55).
MARKETIZATION OF CARE AND THE
”OUTSOURCED FAMILY”
Discussions of childcare illustrate how women’s increased participation in the
labour market has sparked a growing market for household and caring ser-
vices in the formal economy. These services include childcare, house-cleaning,
restaurant meals, and prepared deli and grocery food. Such developments
respond to growing time pressures and “care deficits” within the home, which
increasingly led families to buy in services and in the words of Robert Reich
(2000) and Arlie Hochschild (2012) “outsource” family life. In a study
on the rising marketization of caregiving in Canada, Nickela Anderson and
Karen Hughes (2010) note estimates from Statistics Canada that value the
domestic market for childcare at more than $3.5 billion in the early 2000s.
Of note, nearly one-third of dual-earner families purchased childcare and one
in 10 families purchased some type of house-cleaning service. Consumption
was heavily tied to income, but even among low-income, female-headed
households (typically the most financially strapped), more than one quarter
purchased childcare.
Examining this phenomenon in a recent study The Outsourced Self-
Arlie Hochschild catalogues a wide array of family and household work that
was once done in the home but is now being purchased in local, regional,
and national markets in North America. Childcare is certainly common. But
Hochschild also shows there is an ever-expanding range of services. Beyond
basic domestic assistance, such as Molly Maid, other businesses with names
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such as Rent-A-Husband and 1.877.99HUBBY cover household repairs,
outdoor work, snow shovelling, and lawn mowing. Special celebrations and
“kin work” can also be purchased, with children’s birthdays, anniversaries,
and family reunions now falling under the purview of birthday planners.
Other services, such as Kids in Motion and Driving Miss Daisy, Inc., help get
children and elderly family members safely to school, activities, and medical
and other appointments. Cooking services, which stockpile fridges and freezers
with day-to-day and special meals, as well as personal shoppers, who purchase
gifts or run time-consuming errands, are also increasingly in demand.
Developments such as these illustrate how some families are adapting
to workplace demands and also highlight the fluid, ever-changing boundary
between market and household work. At the same time, the marketization of
household and caring work draws attention to the ways in which hierarchies
based on class, race, and citizenship are reproduced. As Canadians increasingly
outsource family life, they come to rely on systems of transnational caregiving
and stratified hierarchies of reproduction hiring working-class women and
women from countries in the global south to provide paid care as nannies or
as child- and elder-care workers, or to cook, clean, and work as housekeepers
and domestic cleaners (Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2002; Duffy 2011).23 Such
arrangements may solve care deficits in their own homes, but they create new
sets of problems, worsening inequalities and care deficits in the families of paid
caregivers, both within and outside Canada.
CONCLUSION
We began this chapter by noting the often invisible nature of household and
caring work, and the persistence of women’s responsibility for family life. We
also questioned whether gendered patterns of household caring work have
shifted in recent decades as more women work as earners and breadwinners
than ever before. Certainly, many people have expected to see men play a
growing role in the household as women’s labour force participation has
soared since the 1970s. Yet, accumulating evidence shows small degrees of
change for example, greater sharing of household work among younger
generations and in same-sex households. Overall, the pace of change is excep-
tionally slow. Reductions in the gender gap in family work stem as much, if
not more, from women reducing the time they devote to certain tasks than to
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men dramatically expanding their contributions. Increasingly, one way North
American families appear to be reconciling work and family life is through
outsourcing a trend that has fuelled the growth of low-paid caring work in
the formal economy, and the reproduction of gender-, race-, and class-based
inequalities, given that such work is typically done by women, immigrants,
and those with little education. Another response has been to limit family size
or simply not have children thus fuelling trends toward population aging in
Canada, as we discussed in Chapter 3.
With many employers offering still fairly limited options for effectively
balancing work and family life despite public concern about the need for
more family-friendly workplaces these patterns are perhaps not surprising.
Further, they reflect Canada’s failure to develop a system of affordable, acces-
sible, quality childcare. Within this context, families struggle to juggle work
and household demands, with high rates of work-family conflict the result.
Those who can afford to do so may opt out of paid work to nurture young
children (typically the mother, though stay-at-home dads are a growing trend).
Such choices, however, carry high costs for individual caregivers, reducing
future earnings and job prospects, and creating risks of poverty and finan-
cial insecurity in cases of family breakdown. Sociologists, especially feminist
analysts, have long noted that the costs of raising families are borne largely
by individuals (mainly women), while the wider benefits flow to the society
as a whole. Shifting from a universal breadwinner model (which assumes that
workers are endlessly available and free of caring responsibilities) to a universal
caregiver model (which recognizes the caring responsibilities of all workers)24
would go a long way to recognizing the economic value of care, while also
reducing gender and other social inequalities, and resolving persistent social
problems of work-family conflict.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. Discuss the changing relationship between household work and market
work in the course of Canada’s economic development. How has the
work in each domain changed in the transition from a pre-industrial, to
an industrial, to a postindustrial society?
2. What is meant by the terms household work and social reproduction? What
types of activities do these terms refer to?
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3. Discuss key trends in women’s and men’s contributions to housework,
childcare, and eldercare. How much change has taken place? How do we
explain these patterns?
4. What is work-family conflict, and how does it affect working women and
men? How might employers and governments assist in reducing work-
family conflict?
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
WORK AT THE MOVIES
• No Time to Stop: Stories of Immigrant \%men (directed by Helene
Klodawsky, 1990, 29.05 minutes). This NFB documentary tells the
story of immigrant women of colour in Canada and their struggles at
home and at work. It is available through the National Film Board of
Canada: http:/ /www3.nfb.ca/ acrosscultures/theme_ vis. php?id=2004&
mediaid=660690&full.
• The Motherload (directed by Cornelia Principe, 2014, 45:10 minutes).
Focusing on working women in Canada, this documentary examines the
challenges they face as they struggle to balance work and family. It is available
through CBC Doc Zone: http:/ /www.cbc.ca/ doczone/ episodes/ motherload.
• When Strangers Re-Unite (directed by Florchita Bautista and Marie Boti,
1999, 52 minutes). This NFB documentary explores the challenges faced
by foreign domestic workers in Canada navigating through the immigra-
tion process, dealing with being separated from their families back home,
and reuniting with family as they eventually come to Canada. It is avail-
able through the National Film Board of Canada: http:/ /www3.nfb.ca/
acrosscultures/toutvoir_vis.php?mediaid=665737&mc=102&full.
• Baby Mama (directed by Michael McCullers, 2008, 99 minutes). A
successful single businesswoman hires a working-class woman to be her
surrogate child-bearer.
SOUNDS OF WORK
• “The Scaffolder’s Wife” (Mark Knopfler). Knopfler’s song describes the
struggles of the wife of a scaffolder whose hard work, keeping company
books, has helped their business stay afloat.
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• “Nice Work If You Can Get It” (George Gershwin). The song champions
care work, family, and human connections over paid work.
• “One’s on the Way” (Loretta Lynn). Lynn describes the unpaid work
that often falls to women. Her song highlights the various kinds of work
women perform for the home and as caregivers.
• “Somebody’s Hero” Qamie O’Neal). Here is an ode to the women who
forgo paid work to perform essential housework and carework. O’Neal’s
heroes work as cooks, waiters, and taxi drivers, only for no pay.
NOTES
1. Details of the strike were covered in articles in the Globe and Mail and the
National Post. A personal account is provided by Stilwell at http://strikingmom.
blogspot.ca/.
2. For discussions of patriarchy, see Hartmann (1976), Lerner (1986), and Walby
(1990).
3. This post-WWII pattern is described in Ostry (1968). See also Canada,
Department of Labour (1958). On the concept of breadwinning, see Warren
(2007).
4. For a discussion of how married and pregnant women were expected to exit paid
jobs, see Sangster (1995). For a personal account of a woman who transgressed
cultural norms by working throughout her pregnancies, see Rebel Daughter by
Doris Anderson (1996).
5. Calculations are from Statistics Canada, CANSIM, Table 111-0020, “Family
Characteristics, Single-Earner and Dual-Earner Families by Number of Children.”
For additional information on families, living arrangements, and unpaid work in
Canada, see Milan et al. (2011).
6. Hochschild (1989). See Pupa (1997), Marshall (2006b, 2009), and Beaujot and
Anderson (2007) for recent trends in Canadian families. For studies of house-
hold divisions of labour, see Luxton (1980) and Duffy and Pupa (1992). For
valuable conceptual discussions of household work, see Eichler and Albanese
(2007), Luxton (1997), and Warren (2011). For poems on household work, see
Treathaway (2000).
7. For Canadian and U.S. surveys of this literature, see Coltrane (2000), Bianchi
and Milkie (2010), Doucet (2006), Beaujot (2000), and Kan et al. (2011). For
recent studies of factors shaping fathers’ contributions to housework and caring,
see Cunningham (2007), Gupta (2006), Hook (2006), and Halrynjo
(2009).
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8. Marshall (1993: 12). Data are from the 1990 General Social Survey (GSS).
A note of caution: There is some bias in how the survey measures housework
because it is based on the perceptions of only one respondent per household
(either male or female).
9. See Marshall (2006: 10-13) for more details. Doucet (2006), Coltrane (2000),
and McFarlane, Beaujot, and Haddad (2000) provide excellent overviews of
research in this area.
10. There are many insightful studies on this issue. On fathering, see Doucet (2006),
Ball and Daly (2012), and Fox, Pascali, and Warren (2009). On mothering,
see Blair-Loy (2003), Hays (1996), McMahon (2005), and Stone (2007). On
parenting, see Ranson (2010), Nelson (1996), and Fox (1997).
11. For valuable discussions and overviews of recent trends in Canada, see Cranswick
and Dosman (2008), Cranswick (2003), Turcotte (2013), Stonebridge (2013),
and Sinha (2013).
12. While Turcotte (2013) does not examine gender patterns in detail, analysis of the
2010 General Social Survey by Milan et al. (2011: 24) shows that women typi-
cally provide more hours of care to seniors. While women and men are equally
likely to provide care to a senior living in the same household, nearly half of the
women (48.9o/o) report providing 10 hours or more of care, compared to just
one-quarter of men. Women are also more likely to report longer hours of care
(10 hours or more) for seniors not living in the same household.
13. For more information about the voluntary sector, visit the websites of the
Voluntary Sector Initiative (http:/ /www.vsi-isbc.org) and Imagine Canada, which
represents voluntary and nonprofit organizations (http:/ /www.imaginecanada.
ca). For a more theoretical analysis of volunteer work, based on trends in the
United States, see Wilson (2000). An interesting discussion of community work
is provided by Uttal (2009).
14. Hochschild, Arlie. (1989). The Second Shift: Working Parents and the Revolution at
Home. New York: Viking Penguin, p. 12.
15. Concepts and measurement are discussed in Bellavia and Frane (2005), Carlson
and Grzywacz (2008), and Greenhaus and Beutell (1985).
16. For valuable reviews and discussions, see Bellavia and Frane (2005), Bianchi and
Milkie (2010), Byron (2005), Kelly, Murphy, and Kaskubar (2008), and Korabik,
Lero, and Whitehead (2008).
17. See Duxbury and Higgins (2001), Duxbury (2004), and Duxbury and Higgins
(2012). The 1991 study surveyed 37,000 employees across Canada, while
the 2001 study surveyed close to 33,000 employees in 100 medium to large
Canadian organizations: for details, see Duxbury (2004: 1-2). The third survey,
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conducted in 2011, surveyed more than 25,000 Canadians working in 71 public,
private, and non-profit organizations (Duxbury and Higgins 2012).
18. For excellent reviews and meta-analysis on such outcomes, see Kossek and Ozeki
(1998), Allen et al. (2000), Bellavia and Frane (2005), Dorio, Bryant, and Allen
(2008), Mullen, Kelley, and Kelloway (2008), and Amstad (2011).
19. For a review of work and family policies in Canada, see Skrypnek and Fast
(1996). For a discussion of U.S. policies, see Blau and Ehrenberg (2000) and
Bianchi and Milkie (2010). For the United Kingdom, see Lewis (2009).
20. For valuable discussions of the impact of work-family policies on women’s
employment, see Hedgewisch and Gornick (2011) and Gornick and Meyers
(2009).
21. For an overview and discussion of Johnstone v. CBSA, see the Legal Education
and Action Fund (LEAF) website at http://lea£ca/2014/02/leaf-intervening-in-
j ohnsto ne-v -canada-border -services-agency-at-the-federal-court-of-appeal/.
22. For a comparison of family-related policies and programs in Canada and other
countries, see Beach et al. (2009) and Mahon (2002). For a valuable discussion
of childcare in Quebec, see Albanese (2006).
23. For additional discussions of global care deficits, see Isaksen, Devi, and Hochschild
(2008), Spitzer et al. (2003), and Zimmerman, Litt, and Bose (2006).
24. These ideas have been developed in a wide body of writing by feminist scholars,
but are well articulated by Nancy Fraser (1997) in her article ”After the Family
Wage: A Post-Industrial Thought Experiment.”
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