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East Asian Mothers in Britain pp 201–231Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Gendered Division of Household Labour

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Part of the book series: Palgrave Macmillan Studies in Family and Intimate Life ((PSFL))

Abstract

As a social construct, ‘gender is a powerful ideological device, which produces, reproduces, and legitimates the choices and limits that are predicated on sex categories’ (West and Zimmerman 1987, p. 147).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Studies have indicated that men’s involvement in household chores and childcare is inclined to show different tendencies (Mannino and Deutsch 2007; Almqvist and Duvander 2014). According to Mannino and Deutsch (2007), men tend to prefer childcare to housework because the former is less tedious and more rewarding than the latter. As a result, men’s participation in childcare increased more than in housework. Based on this, researchers have claimed that housework and childcare should not be conflated in assessing the gendered division of household labour . Following on from this, I refer to housework and childcare separately in my discussion in order to avoid any conflation; however, the actual separation between the two might not be always clear as they are deployed under the umbrella term of domestic labour. My aim is not to try to measure the exact amount of gendered division of domestic chores and childcare between couples but to explore how it is represented and how the meanings around gender relations are discursively constructed in their stories.

  2. 2.

    The number of years interviewees had lived in Britain is an estimation measured at the time of the interviews.

  3. 3.

    Sixteen participants described their husbands as contributing to domestic labour, although it was limited to a secondary role. Most of their husbands worked full-time, except for two—one worked four days and the other was unemployed at the time of the interview; compared to this, only three women in this group worked full-time while the majority (13 out of the 16) were either stay-at-home mums (eight) or part-time employed (five). Seven women in this group were Chinese (five from China and two from Hong Kong), six were Japanese, and three were of Korean origin. Eight of their husbands were White British, and the other eight were of East Asian origin—four Chinese, two Korean and two Japanese.

  4. 4.

    She opted not to provide her household income, as noted in Chapter 5.

  5. 5.

    Beth also opted not to provide her household income details.

  6. 6.

    As discussed in Chapter 4, her household income was over £80,000.

  7. 7.

    Except for one participant who got married to a White British man, husbands of all the participants in this group were of East Asian origin—seven Korean and three Chinese. Seven women in this group were of Korean origin, three were Chinese and one Japanese. Seven of them were stay-at-home mothers, three were full-time employed and one part-time. All of their husbands worked full-time.

  8. 8.

    Hua chose not to provide the details of her household income.

  9. 9.

    As outlined in Chapter 3, these include: East Asian women’s gender ideologies; educational level; economic circumstances of the family; reasons for migration; the length of settlement in Britain; ethnicity of their husbands; and the local areas of their settlement.

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  1. Faculty of Health & Social Sciences, Bournemouth University, Bournemouth, UK

    Hyun-Joo Lim

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Lim, HJ. (2018). Gendered Division of Household Labour. In: East Asian Mothers in Britain . Palgrave Macmillan Studies in Family and Intimate Life. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75635-6_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75635-6_6

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