Little Children Are Not For Dads: Negotiating Care Responsibilities beyond Income Inequality in Dual Earner Couples

• In Event: 054 - Section on the Sociology of the Family Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 16. Parent-Child and Sibling Relationships

Abstract

In everyday life, gender inequality is persistently practiced by modern couples throughout North America and Europe and seems to be quite resistant to change. The transition to parenthood has been found to be the crucial gateway for a gendered division of labor often with employment disruption by the mother after childbirth. I argue that not the (mostly) higher income of the father but the implicit or explicit processes of negotiation within the couple are crucial for deciding ‘who cares’ and ‘who is interrupting waged work’.
Based on a grounded theory analysis of extensive face-to-face and group interviews with nine heterosexual couples with infants in Germany, this paper presents new empirical data explaining the diverging care involvement beyond income inequality. The systematic comparison of the extensive narrations by the couple (or one partner) has revealed four reasoning figures explaining the division of child care responsibilities: ‘hegemonic mothering’, ‘sameness tabooing’, ‘maternal gatekeeping’ and ‘equally shared parenting’. Based on my empirical work I propose the systematic consideration of the complex and ambivalent negotiations within couples as level sui generis to gain one important source of explanation for the lasting gender inequality in North America and Europe.

Author

• Almut C. Peukert, University of Tuebingen