M2A1 Project 1 Summary – Critique of Article

The article “The production of inequality: The gender division of labor across the transition to parenthood” is a journal of marriage and family that was written by Jill Yavorsky, Claire Kamo Dush, and Sarah Schoppe-Sull. The article was first published on April 28th, 2015. The authors intended to reveal the level of completeness or incompleteness of the revolution of gender matters in the United States. The authors rebuke the proposal given by other scholars, which says that the gender revolution has delayed because they feel that equitable divisions of labor are yet to be delivered.

In order to prove that inequality in domestic labor still exists as parents transition to parenthood, Jill Yavorsky, Claire Kamo Dush, and Sarah Schoppe-Sull reviewed Exchange and bargaining perspectives theory. This theory was proposed by Matheson, Bittman, Folbre, England, and in the year 2003. The theory spotlights on power in terms of income. Under this theory, a partner who brings more income to the family can leverage to bargain out of domestic chores Sayer, and work of propose that unequal responsibilities among women and men are still experienced in the realm of parenthood. The authors feel that the theory is not valid as research conducted by other scholars depicts that despite women’s higher incomes, men seem to be responding unwillingly to female-typed activities, such as housework and child care.

The authors also reviewed the cultural conceptualizations of fatherhood, which was presented by Pleck in 2010 and Yoshida in 2012. Pleck and Yoshida propose that fatherhood has shifted from economic responsibility to view that fathers should as well aid in the caring of their children to create close emotional ties to their children. Under similar conceptualizations, mothers’ roles have been seen to be expanding to include economic responsibilities. From these concepts, the authors confirm that equitable division of domestic labor is yet to be delivered; hence gender evolution has not stalled as seen by other scholars.

Methodology used

The authors used a survey and a longitudinal time diary as methods of examining the division of labor in both paid and unpaid work. The test population constituted dual-earner couples with high education and who was on the transition to parenthood were chosen as the respondents. In time diaries, respondents were asked to reconstruct a specific day. During that day, they were required to report every single activity that they performed together with the time taken, place that the event took place, and any person that was present at that time. On the other hand, surveys involved asking respondents to give an estimation of the time that they spent on specified activities such as washing dishes every week.

Longitudinal time diaries were then used to give more reliable data of time use patterns among different couples. Discrepancies between time diary and survey reports were assessed. This is because the authors considered time diaries to be much more accurate than surveys. The time diaries exhibited that much of child care was left for mothers while the survey gave overestimated data as compared to time diary data and was considered as biased. He disparity displayed by the two methods illustrates that longitudinal time diaries present a qualitative method, whereas surveys present quantitative.

The authors could have considered using a mixture of the test population to make their findings more valid. For instance, they should have incorporated couples who only one partner works. Also, couples who are not highly educated but they engage in low-income jobs could have been included. A comparison of the different times spent by different couples of dissimilar classes could have helped in giving more accurate estimates. It would be inappropriate to generalize that there is inequality in domestics labor when only a small section of the population considered.