Intergenerational Transmission of Gender Roles and Contextual Variations: Housework of Parents and Children in China

• In Event: 155 - Regular Session. Women's Work in a Globalizing World

Abstract

As differentiated gender roles in adulthood find their roots in one’s identity, preference and behavior formed in childhood, it is vital to examine the gendered pattern of children’s housework in order to understand the “stalled revolution” of gender roles in the domestic sphere. Whereas most research on children’s housework has been conducted in “non-traditional” developed Western countries, we examine the housework time of boys and girls aged 10-15 from two-parent Chinese families. Adopting a multilevel perspective of gender, we combine the two major theories of gender role reproduction, namely intergenerational socialization and normative context. Drawing on data from the new China Family Panel Studies 2010, we explore (1) the relationship between parents’ relative housework share and children’s housework time, (2) how the intergenerational processes vary by children’s gender, immediate (earning model) and wider (rural-urban) normative contexts. We find the father’s housework share to be significantly associated with boys’ housework time, which follows a non-linear pattern. The immediate and wider normative contexts have divergent effects on the intergenerational transmission of housework behavior for boys. Different from Western research, girls’ housework time is not affected by their parents’ relative domestic roles in China, which may reflect the persisting traditional gender norms. This research contributes to the existing literature by (1) providing insights that are otherwise uncovered by previous Western literature and (2) revealing how the transmission of gender roles across generations is conditioned by normative contexts.

Author

• Yang Hu, University of Cambridge