The readings discuss some of the different ways that gender penalizes women and imposes restrictive and unequal expectations on them. Although we have taken great strides to empower women over the last century, due to cultural inertia, true gender equality remains an elusive goal. Women and men have yet to share equal roles and responsibilities in the domestic sphere, and this imbalance affects women’s advancement toward equality in occupational attainment and earnings in the professional sphere.
Although women have been steadily increasing the rates at which they hold full-time jobs, participate in the labor force, and work more than forty hours a week, they continue to bear the brunt of childrearing responsibilities. Working mothers make more sacrifices than working fathers in terms of sleep and leisure time, in order to meet simultaneous career and childcare demands. The average amount of time that men devote to household duties, including doing chores, spending time with their children, and engaging in other unpaid work around the home, has hardly changed from when most men were married to fulltime homemakers who had time to do all of those things. Household work has also largely remained allocated along gender stereotypical lines. Women and men shoulder household burdens unequally, with women giving up more leisure time to do the lion’s share of the work (Bianchi, 2011). This gender disparity has also been born out in the workplace. As women are expected to make more sacrifices for their family, they end up making career trade-offs that negatively affect their lifetime earnings (Budig & England, 2001). Increasing awareness about both the “wage gap” and the “leisure gap” through education has been offered as a possible solution to the work/home gender imbalance.
Works Cited
Bianchi, Suzanne M. "Family change and time allocation in American families." The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 638.1 (2011): 21-44.
Budig, Michelle J., and Paula England. "The wage penalty for motherhood."American sociological review (2001): 204-225.
