Contemporary Chinese Married Couples: Sex Roles and Divisions of Housework Labor

• In Event: 220 - Section on the Sociology of the Family Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 02. Gender Identity, Housework, and Parenting

Abstract

The aim of this article is to study the relationship between sex roles and division of household labor of contemporary Chinese married couples. We select 279 married couples in total, aged from 20 to 65 years old, from Sichuan and Chongqing Province of China by snowball sampling. In order to explore how sex roles (masculine, feminine, androgyny and undifferentiated type) and sex temperament scores influence the division of housework, we mainly take the Bem’s Sex Role Inventory (BSRI) and the division of household labor questionnaire as statistical tools. The proportion of undifferentiated type is higher than other three types of sex roles. The contribution rate of housework is negatively correlated with male’s masculine trait scores but positively correlated with male’s feminine trait scores. It suggests that the sex roles maybe have greater effect on male’s housework performance than that of female’s, and male’s sex roles type and their sex traits probable respectively correlated with their division of household labor.

Authors

• Guowei Wang, School of Sociology,Northeast Normal University

• Yue Wang, Independent Scholar