Negotiating Patriarchal Persistence and Financial Necessity: Gender Role Transformations in Dual-Earner Families in Pakistan

• In Event: Sociology of Sex and Gender Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 7. Parenting, Household Labor, and Family Negotiation

Abstract

Author: Tipu Sultan
Doctoral student Sociology, University of Bielefeld, Germany

In Pakistan, dual-earner families are increasing due to women access to education more frequently and an increase in the cost of living. However, women income does not guarantee the equal redistribution of the care role, power, and household work. The paper focus on how dual-earner couples negotiate financial necessity under patriarchal gender norms and how these negotiations reorganize care roles, power and household labor between them. With Doing Gender by West and Zimmerman and Masculine Domination by Bourdieu, negotiations are examined as a gendered process that have the ability to change but preserve hierarchy. The qualitative fieldwork in District Gujrat (Punjab) is based on semi-structured interviews of 26 married dual-earner couples (52 interviews) with more than 16 years of education and living in both nuclear and joint families; the results were transcribed and thematically analyzed. Results indicate that dual earning is presented as a necessity in times of inflation and rising housing and education expenses however, the man-breadwinner ideal is still in place. Women continue to be the primary childcare and emotional labor; men perceive their efforts to be seen as a “help” than responsibility. The joint-family agreements offer the logistical backup but also strengthen the intergenerational subordination to the daughters-in-law. The financial necessity promotes accommodation and incremental adjustment instead of structural gender equality among dual-earner couples and the manifestation of patriarchy through negotiated rebalancing.

Author

• Tipu Sultan, University of Bielefeld Germany