Bridgette A. Sheridan is a historian of sexualities at Framingham State University. When Karen Owen’s PowerPoint became news–she’s the Duke student who sent her friends a faux presentation based on her “sex research” on a sample of men whom she’d slept with–Bridgette followed the story with curiosity and then dismay. I had a conversation with her today in her kitchen in Cambridge. Here’s what she said.

VR: So, tell me again what’s your problem with the Karen Owen/Duke Faux Thesis Controversy?

BAS: Yea, I don’t get it. Why is this news? A white woman at an elite college reports in a mildly witty way her sexual adventures—her “dirty sex.” The story gets attention because people are shocked! shocked! shocked! by this “role reversal.” They puzzle over whether this is “good” or “bad” and speculate about its value as a “feminist turning point.”

VR: So that’s not really news?

BAS: This is like stories we’ve been told for a long time, particularly about white middle class women and sexuality. It is an old story about gender, about sex, about race, about class. The story is that “these girls are dirty too.” And then much excitement, worry, and titillation follows. Even though being naughty has been a familiar part of the sexual landscape in America for a long time, we keep getting especially worked up about it when we hear about it from yuppy women.

VR: What is dirty sex?

BAS: Hmmm. For white elite girls it is sex without commitment. It is sex focused on her own pleasure, rather than on her emotions about the person with whom she was having sex. Blow jobs rather than intercourse. Talking dirty rather than keeping the lights out. Sexting rather than sending flowers.

I love the question “what is dirty sex” because it draws our attention to how much sex is coded through social class, not just gender.

When I first started reading about the Duke episode, what I thought of immediately was the Milton Academy sex scandal of a few years ago, and it even took me back to Katie Roiphe’s commentary on date rape in the early 1990s.

VR: What happened at Milton?

BAS: Through an expose (Restless Virgins [!]) published in 2007 by young women from Milton Academy we learned about the fabulous, terrible sexual underworld at Milton after news broke of a 15-year-old female student giving blow jobs to five male athletes in the locker room at Milton.  According to Time, the charge about the book was that it read more like soft porn than sociology.

I would argue that the shocking and fascinating part for most people was “this is happening at an elite institution” – “these girls have so much to live for.”

VR: What’s the Katie Roiphe link?

BAS: Way back in the 1990s Roiphe wrote a book, The Morning After, based on her experiences at Harvard and Princeton, and her skepticism about the “campus rape crisis.” She came to the conclusion that all the (then) new dialogue on campus about date rape was overhyped and that women were full, knowing participants in the sexual dramas that unfolded on campus.

Here’s the link: For Roiphe, the story was women are just like men; for Milton, the worry was sure boys will be boys but a sexual revolution might mean that girls are like boys too. And now with the Duke story the case is, again, something about (elite, privileged) women taking on the characteristics of men.

VR: Wait, you mean the double standard isn’t being violated in these stories?

BAS: This Duke story doesn’t indicate that the double standard has gone away, or that women have more sexual privilege than men. What I mean is, really, for this to be a story at all the double standard has to be in place! That is all it is about. While there is so-called positive commentary such as “Karen Owen reaches the inner feminist in me” … ultimately the kind of shock at and condemnation of Owen and what she has done is always present, and reconfirms our sense that men’s and women’s sexual experiences are fundamentally different, and that this difference is a valuable cultural resource that ought to be protected.

Let me walk you through this: when the story broke, ever so briefly there was concern about the fact that men’s names and images were used in her “sex survey”; the concern about the humanity of those subjects was eclipsed quickly by the interest in the “role reversal.” And how was the issue of men’s names and images resolved? The concern for the men focused on how this would make them seem callous toward women. They wouldn’t be gallant men. There was no fear that they would be slutty men, because the very idea of men being “put down” for their sexual desires is unheard of.

Some online comments from readers at various sites pointed to how, if Karen rated a guy highly that he would have benefited, and that it was only harmful if he didn’t receive high ratings. Do you see how that constitutes a double standard? If you don’t, then think about what it means when someone argues that when a sixth grade boy is seduced by his (woman) school teacher that maybe he is just “luckier” than all the other boys. This is another version of that kind of thinking. This is not feminism.

VR: If this isn’t one, then what would be a feminist turning point?

BAS: I think a feminist turning point would be when this wouldn’t be a story at all. Sexual freedom will exist when there is no such thing as “role reversal” — that is, when there wouldn’t be roles of privilege or statuses of disadvantage. Sounds nice, huh?

-Virginia Rutter

This month’s guest column is by Dr. Sheila Moeschen, an academic, writer, and Public Communications Consultant. For more of her writing, visit: www.citizendame.com. She currently resides in Boston.

The first time I saw the Gap ad for the skinny black pant starring the iconic Audrey Hepburn I was on a treadmill at the gym. The irony of the moment was not lost on my not-so-skinny thighs and me as we plodded along the motorized sidewalk to nowhere.   Released in the fall of 2006, the ad uses footage from her 1957 film Funny Face and shows Hepburn, decked out in a black turtleneck and black, form fitting chinos, rehearsing a modern dance number.  As the badass riffs of AC/DC’s “Back in Black” play, Hepburn kicks, minces, and twirls lithely across the screen.  For Gap, it marked the re-launch of their skinny pants, for the rest of us it announced a new era of fashion: skinny fashion.  The pants flattering Hepburn’s adorable, minx-like figure represented an unreachable brass ring to those of us carrying curves and the baggage of sugar binges gone by.  The notion of catering to a (excuse the pun) narrow population of individuals seemed additionally ludicrous. What woman in her right mind, I wondered, would subject herself to the same kind of physical, fashion bondage suffered by her corseted or foot-bound ancestors? Who would deliberately participate in the tyranny of skinny fashion?

The answer: a lot of women. Four years later the skinny fashion trend remains firmly entrenched in the racks of couture boutiques and mainstream outlets alike.  Gap’s skinny pant gave way to skinny jeans, which birthed skinny lyrca denim, known as “jeggings,” which helped to bring back stretchy, cotton leggings, the kind sported by late-80s teen sensations Debbie Gibson and Tiffany.  Though designers have created skinny clothing lines for men and women, it is women’s figures that manufacturers have in their crosshairs.  Correction, make that women’s and babies’ figures, as Gap recently released a line of skinny denim for its Baby Gap stores. It seems clear that skinny fashion constitutes another way manufacturers participate in colonizing women’s bodies.  By transforming a wardrobe staple—denim—to an unrealistic and even sadistic silhouette, designers systematically shift consumer perspective to the skinny line as both desirable and normal.

What is less clear is the way this fashion trend shapes ideas about more than just standards of idealized female physicality.  Feminist theatre historian Elizabeth Wilson writes about the ways in which fashion takes on political and ideological significance.  “Fashion,” Wilson states, “links the biological body to the social being, and public to private. This makes it uneasy territory, since it forces us to recognize that the human body is more than a biological entity. It is an organism in culture, a cultural artifact even, and its own boundaries are unclear.”

The popularity of skinny fashion belies another story about the current enculturation of the female body.  It is a narrative that speaks to women’s continued restriction and constraints during a historical period where women have made abundant economic, political, and social gains. Skinny fashion highlights the intersection of the biological and the cultural bodies as Wilson points out, ultimately presenting a depiction of women in crisis: they are asked to support a culture of thinness and health; they are sexually empowered but also subjects of sexual double standards; they wield tremendous power and influence on the world stage and yet must answer to charges about being “too feminine” or “not feminine enough.”  It is no wonder that women take some form of misplaced comfort in fashion that leaves nothing to the imagination, that puts the body in a clear delineation of terms: attractive or not attractive, fit or unfit, Hepburn-esque or everyone else.

The GWP collective seeks an additional blogger to add to our lineup who can also function as our webmaster.

The ideal candidate is organized, self-motivated, tech savvy, and familiar with WordPress; has a great idea for a monthly column to add to our column pool; is excited about feminism and media; and is ready to serve as a hub.  This is a unique opportunity for an emerging or established blogger to gain additional web/communication/organizational skills and work experience at the intersection of academia and the blogosphere as part of a highly visible (so we are told!) feminist blog.

Webmaster/blogger duties entail:

• responding to reader queries that come in through the “contact” form (the majority of which are either requests to be included on GWP’s blogroll, or press releases); forwarding relevant press releases to the relevant GWP blogger
• updating GWP’s blogroll
• letting an author or organization know when her/his book or study has been mentioned or reviewed and sending her/him the link to the post
• tweeting links to posts, posting on FB, Digg, other relevant social media and social bookmarking sites
• dealing with any tech issues that come up for GWP’s crew of 10 bloggers
• adding new books by GWP’s bloggers to the sidebar and the “Our Books” page
• serving as a point person for GWP bloggers for anything else that comes up
• recruiting a new regular blogger or two here and there when current bloggers rotate out; setting up said new blogger with a bio page and showing them the ropes

GWP is a collective.  We all do it for the love.  To continue to thrive, we need a substitute for me, at present, as its hub.  If interested in the position, please contact me at deborah@shewrites.com with a brief note about why you are the right fit, and a pitch for your column.  Candidates will be interviewed by phone by a current GWP blogger.  And please, if you know someone who you think would be a good match for this position, pass it on!

This month’s guest column* by Christine H. Morton, PhD, a research sociologist at the California Maternal Quality Care Collaborative, draws on her research and publications on women’s reproductive experiences and maternity care advocacy roles, including the doula and childbirth educator. She is the founder of ReproNetwork.org, an online listserv for social scientists studying reproduction.

The ever-evolving history of the childbirth reform movement has new developments, which need to be incorporated into the older story which documents the shift from home to hospital birth; and the paradigm clash of midwifery and medical models of birth reflecting holistic and technocratic values, respectively. We need to incorporate the story of the doula, which I argue, is one of many efforts to bridge the divide – to provide, as Robbie Davis-Floyd has called it, humanistic care in birth, which is what most women desire.

History is happening now. In addition to the emergence of the doula in the past thirty years, more recently, we see efforts underway in maternal health policy (Childbirth Connections’ Transforming Maternity Care), among physician and nursing professionals (most especially around maternal quality measures, and maternity quality improvement) and resurgence among, for lack of a better word, ‘consumers’ or childbearing women, who seek greater access to vaginal birth after cesarean (VBAC). What are the goals of each stakeholder; how do they intersect and overlap, and come into conflict with one another? This is a big story, and we need to tell it!

I take a small slice of this larger historical backdrop to consider the interconnected history of childbirth educators and doulas, which will be the subject of my research presentation at the Lamaze-ICEA Mega Conference in Milwaukee.

To back up a bit, when I embarked on my sociological investigation of the doula role, I was interested in many aspects of this innovative approach to childbirth advocacy and support. What strategies and mechanisms enabled women with no medical training to insert themselves at the site where medical care is delivered to a patient in a hospital, and enact their self-defined role? Why did women become doulas and what did the work mean for those who were able to sustain a regular practice over time? How were doulas utilizing and leveraging the corpus of evidence based research which suggested their impact was as great, if not greater, than that of the physician, the culture of the obstetric unit, or the labor and delivery nurse? Where did doulas come from? What, in the history of childbirth reform, or childbirth education, or labor/delivery nursing, could help me understand how doulas emerged at this point in time in U.S. history?

Later, after learning that there were limited histories of childbirth education (by non-childbirth educators), and little research on the history of obstetric nursing, I had to take a step back and consider these factors as well. Why was the work and perspectives of women who support other women during childbirth an overlooked piece of historical research? Why did histories of women’s health reform efforts largely exclude childbirth reform? Why had there been no history of the women who were involved in childbirth education; in labor and delivery nursing; in the mainstream arena of birth care in the US? So as not to be accused of ignoring the scholarship that does exist in this area, I acknowledge my debt to Margot Edwards and Mary Waldorf; to Judith Walzer Leavitt, to Barbara Katz Rothman, Robbie Davis-Floyd, Margarete Sandelowski, Deborah Sullivan and Rose Weitz, Judith Rooks and Richard and Dorothy Wertz (I can make my full bibliography available to those interested). I have been inspired by these histories, but they focused less on the women (childbirth educators) who were making history and more on the larger cultural shifts in beliefs about medicine, technology, women’s bodies and reproduction.

When childbirth education per se was a topic of inquiry, the research focus tended to be on the primary sources of the male physician champions – Grantly Dick-Read, whose work informed the natural birth movement, and Ferdinand Lamaze (and his US counterparts – Thank you Dr. Lamaze author Marjorie Karmel and Elisabeth Bing) who formulated a method for accomplishing unmedicated, awake and aware childbirth. However, most of this scholarship makes unsubstantiated generalizations about what particular childbirth educators (of various philosophies /organizations) believed, and how they taught. There is surprisingly little in the way of empirical research – few scholars interviewed childbirth educators or conducted systematic observation of their classes over time.

So after completing my dissertation on the emergence of the doula role, I had the great opportunity to continue with my research interest through a research grant from Lamaze International to conduct an ethnographic investigation of childbirth education, with my colleague, medical anthropologist Clarissa Hsu. We talked to educators, observed their classes and analyzed our data.

We found that educators who were actively practicing doulas drew heavily on their direct labor support experiences as authoritative resources for stories and examples that supplemented the material they taught. Actively practicing doulas also included more curricular content on early labor than educators without such experience. Having real births to draw upon provided doula-educators a different type of credibility and authority than educators without such current labor support experience. These educators relied on other mechanisms to establish their authority, such as knowledge of the latest research on birth and use of more authoritarian teaching styles.

We found that the intersection of doula practice and childbirth education has significantly affected how childbirth preparation classes are taught, and this new infusion of practice and ideology is worth exploring. I encourage you to explore this with us, and welcome your thoughts.

*Note: this column was originally posted on the Science & Sensibility blog.

I am pleased to share a guest column by Afshan Jafar. Afshan is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Connecticut College. She studies and teaches about cultural globalization, gender, religious fundamentalism, and trans-national women’s movements. Her forthcoming book, Women’s NGOs in Pakistan, uncovers the overwhelming challenges facing women’s NGOs and examines the strategies used by them to ensure not just their survival but an acceptance of their messages by the larger public.

I am horrified by the August 9^th 2010 Time magazine cover which shows an 18 year old Afghan woman, Aisha, without her nose. We are told that she fled her abusive in-laws, only to be dragged out of her home and taken away by the Taliban. She then had her nose and ears sliced off by her husband—while her brother-in-law held her down. The cover brings up a range of emotions in me – rage, grief, terror, but also resentment, irritation, and bitterness.

What bothers me about this image? Shouldn’t the world see the atrocities of the Taliban? When the people at Time decide to bring this image to the world, aren’t they giving voice to these women by telling their story? I wish it were that simple. Instead, I can’t help but wonder why is it that Time chose Aisha’s face for the cover rather than any of the other Afghan women’s whose pictures are found inside the issue–pictures of women who did not fit our stereotypes: an Olympic athlete, a talk show host who could belong to any television network in America, a former deputy speaker of parliament. But I suppose that wouldn’t sell as much as the picture they chose.

When Time publicizes this image, or when Jay Leno’s wife, Mavis Nicholson Leno, parades women in burqas on talk shows, or when Laura Bush talks of “liberating Afghan women”, what is left unexplored is that “Western” media attention can sometimes undermine the internal critiques generated by local women, activists, feminists, and academics. Our critiques are then seen, especially in our local contexts, as being complicit with Western interests, and we are seen as mere extensions of the Western media empire.

There is another possible outcome of the (often sensationalistic) coverage of Muslim women by Western media. Because of the stereotypical and one-dimensional image of the Muslim woman as oppressed, unaware of her rights, and really no more than a shadowy figure gazing out from behind the veil (always the veil), and the analogous image of the Muslim man as the oppressor—“backward,” pre-modern, uncivilized, evil, and anti-woman—Muslims, including academics and activists, have been put on the defensive.

A women’s rights activist in Pakistan once said to me, “you know, we shouldn’t wash our dirty linens in public”. But if activists, feminists, and academics, aren’t willing to “wash our dirty linens in public” then we might as well find some other profession for ourselves—preferably one that does not burden us with the task of questioning the existing social order. When we ignore the plight of people in the name of honoring or respecting a particular culture or tradition, we fail to ask some crucial questions: How was this particular tradition or practice “invented”? Who does it benefit? Exactly whose rights, and which systems of privilege and oppression, are we upholding when we honor the rights of a culture over those of its individuals?

And this is the burden of the social and cultural critic who belongs to an under-represented, and often times, misrepresented group of people. We spend much of our time fighting the stereotypes, telling the story from the other side, or highlighting the neglected accounts. And at the same time we have the responsibility of questioning our own cultural practices. It is a marginalized existence no matter how you look at it. To insiders we seem like traitors who dare expose the weaknesses—the “dirty laundry”—and to “outsiders” we are often a lone voice crying in the wilderness.

Perhaps this is why I respond to the Time cover the way I do. It reminds me of all the work that needs to be done—on the inside as well as the outside—and it confronts me with the reality of how little things have changed—on the inside as well as the outside. I doubt these emotions are unknown to anybody who has felt the burden of simultaneously representing and critiquing one’s culture, of giving voice to those who aren’t heard very often, while at the same time being urged not to speak too loudly for fear that the rest of the world might hear us.

-Afshan Jafar can be reached at afshan.jafar@conncoll.edu

Sandra Guy’s profile of Ford’s Explorer design team schooled us on how to highlight women in engineering by making the women’s work smart but not too girly:

[Jennifer] Brace, a user interface engineer in Ford’s Human-Machine Interface Group, said she made sure that the buttons on the touchscreens accommodate the touch of a woman’s fingernails.

The reality is that many women have long nails. Even my nails get on the longish end of the spectrum, so the idea that touch screens would recognize nails is awesome.

A mom with kids might prefer to see the most fuel-efficient route to her destination, or ask the SUV to find the nearest ice-cream parlor and watch the directions pop up.

Clearly someone knows parenthood. And it’s presented in a non-judgmental way and not in a “oh, look, a mommy car!” way.

Drivers of the new Explorer can give vocal commands for the SUV to “find Starbucks,” or “find parking” or, Richardson’s favorite, “find a shoe store,” and the vehicle’s navigation technology does just that.

Cause what woman doesn’t drive around once in awhile thinking, “If only I could find X?” but can’t take time to stop and type that question into the GPS system? And yes, by using shoe shopping, it targets women, again without being condescending.

Though female engineers are widely scattered among small, medium and large private companies, these women — who are based at Ford Motor Co. headquarters in Dearborn, Mich. — represent the 12.2 percent who work for companies with 25,000 or more employees, according to the National Science Foundation’s 2006 Scientists and Engineers Statistical Data System surveys, the latest available.

Julie Levine and Julie Rocco, commonly called the two Julies, work alternate days except for Wednesdays, when they tag-team their job.

In preparing for the Explorer’s introduction at the Ford plant, the two women met many times a week to pore over a matrix with 1,400 items covering 13 pages, trying to figure out solutions for each issue.

Loved this part the most! Guy presents the big issue in the field – the lack of women – but frames it as a positive WITH a solution as to how two of the women stay in the field – job sharing!

The two Julies describe their job-sharing arrangement like a marriage, and credit it with providing them the type of work-life balance that allows them to be involved in their children’s activities.

“We trust each other completely and work toward the same goal,” Rocco said. “That’s what makes it successful.”

Ahhh…such a wonderful end to an inspiring story AND it helps to debunk the myth that women can’t work together in a positive, respectful and empowering manner, especially when working in a dude-dominated field.

This isn’t Guy’s only example of tooting the horn of women in science, engineering and technology without painting it in pink and giggles. I only wish the Sun-Times archives went back further to show you! But there was just something about her latest column that really hit me in the heart and gut. Maybe it was because my campus’ fall semester had just started and I was still on that high I get during the first weeks of reconnecting with returning students and basking in the new energy of new students. Maybe I’m just getting old and sappy. Or maybe I am just damn tired of people thinking that the only way to get girls interested in science is to paint it pink and throw glitter on it. And I love glitter! Instead Guy takes the time to find amazing women doing interesting and socially important (something that is important to many women and girls!) things with their science skills and profiles them. Hopefully parents and teachers are cutting these profiles out and using them in science classes from kindergarten on up to college.

Thanks Sandra Guy!

Here’s something we don’t need a piece of research to tell us (though I’m going to tell you about a really good example): men with MBAs earn a lot more than women with MBAs. Most of the gap is explained by having children – which costs women but not men. Most of that parental-status tax costs women because they have to give up time at the office.

According to a recent article by economists at the University of Chicago and Harvard, who used data on UC Booth School alumni, men and women MBAs start earning about the same at the end of graduate school. But the earnings diverge over time. Nine years after MBA, men average around $400K; women, $250K.

This dramatic difference is much smaller for women who don’t have children. The authors opine that the lower-earning situation of MBA mothers is a consequence of “family constraints and the inflexibility of work schedules in many corporate and finance sector jobs” (p. 249).

A little more to the story: Women who partner (and have kids) with lower-earning men do not have dramatically lower incomes than men on average. And women who partner (and don’t have kids) with higher-earning men keep their wages up in a kind of competitive synergy.

So, with all this information, I was thinking, what if we really wanted to reduce gender inequality? What could we do? And here are three ideas. Like all policy interventions, there are costs and benefits; let’s see what they are and who bears the costs….

Idea number 1: no kids How about women not having children? It would be a bit like Lysistrata, except thanks to birth control, or the option to have sex with women instead of men, women could still have sex. This would make women workers earn more like men workers and should more quickly reduce the gender gap in earnings among MBAs.

The downside: No more yuppy kids. Might be hard on private school enrollments, sleep consultants, that kind of thing. So, maybe not having children won’t work.

Idea number 2: marry down How about women marrying down? Unlike the situation of MBA moms who marry up, marrying down means MBA moms work just as much as ever—and don’t decrease work hours except in the brief period around a child’s arrival in their lives. Though it turns out that when women have higher earning spouses they are more likely to take off time, when men have higher earning spouses, they still remain those “ideal workers” plugging along in the workforce. These are the true income maximizers! These couples are more likely to hire a nanny or use day care, while for man bread-winner couples, having their high-powered women stay home to do the day care themselves is another status marker.

The downside: It could be a little tough on some marriages, at least in the short run: Turns out that marriages with higher-earning or higher-status women are less stable (and harder on men’s health for richer people). Limiting people’s freedom to marry, like limiting their freedom to have kids, isn’t particularly appealing, either.

Idea number 3: work flexibility How about creating more flexible workplaces that don’t penalize men or women for time out or reduced hours? If we really wanted to reduce gender inequality, we could do this. We could stop marginalizing men who seek flexibility, and stop putting up barriers to women seeking the same. It would be a way to promote freedom to have children and care well for them, freedom to marry whom we want, and freedom to participate in the market place in ways that leave constraint behind.

The downside: The authors of this study note that many believe that it is in the “nature of the work” of the high-flying banking and investment world that makes this kind of change especially difficult, and report that such changes have come about a bit more in, for example, medicine. I think more sweeping change is possible. And then, there would be no more papers about that puzzling wage and wealth gap between men and women. Because it isn’t really that much of a puzzle.

–Virginia Rutter

It’s been a little quite round here this summer.  But we’re coming back in blazes come fall.  And speaking of:

Author and Founding Partner of She Writes Deborah Siegel (aka, me!) seeks a webmaster for the group blog Girl w/Pen (www.girlwpen.com) to begin in Fall 2010.  Ideal candidate is organized, self-motivated, tech savvy, and familiar with WordPress; has a strong work ethic; and is excited about feminism and media.  At present, the position is unpaid. This is a unique opportunity for a grad student or recent college grad to gain web/communication/organizational skills and work experience at the intersection of academia and the blogosphere at a highly visible feminist blog.

Webmaster duties entail:

• dealing with any tech issues that come up for GWP’s crew of 10-ish regular monthly bloggers
• adding new books by GWP’s bloggers to the sidebar and the “Our Books” page
• serving as a point person for GWP bloggers for anything else that comes up
• recruiting a new regular blogger or two here and there when current bloggers rotate out; setting up said new blogger with a bio page and showing them the ropes
• responding to reader queries that come in through the “contact” form (the majority of which are either requests to be included on GWP’s blogroll, or press releases)
• updating GWP’s blogroll
• forwarding relevant press releases to the relevant GWP blogger
• letting an author or organization know when her/his book or study has been mentioned or reviewed and sending her/him the link to the post
• tweeting links to posts, posting on FB, Digg, other relevant social media and social bookmarking sites

Candidates will be interviewed by phone. Please send resume and contact info for 2 references to deborah@shewrites.com

(If you know someone who might be the right person for the job, please forward this post!)

There’s s a long-lived puzzle about money, gender, and housework. In heterosexual partnerships where men earn more than women, women do more housework (on average). When men and women earn about the same, their housework contributions become more equal (though women still do more). But, and here’s the puzzle, when women earn more than their men, women again do more housework. (See this for a classic on the puzzle.)

If paid work and housework were “gender neutral” you’d expect there to be an equal trade off in households between paid work and domestic work. Women who earn more would do less housework, and men who earn less would do more housework.

But paid work and housework aren’t just about earning money and running the household—look back at this column on lower-earning men and health for a different example. Instead, paid work and housework are also about “doing gender”… they are activities that help to confirm masculinity (through earning for men) and femininity (through housework for women). But, you already knew that. A new international study (abstract only) tells us more about the symbolic meaning of paid work.

First, signs of change: researcher Sarah Thébaud found that men who believe in gender equality and who work fewer hours or earn less than their (women) partners do modify their housework behavior—a little bit. These men do about one and half hours more housework than their breadwinning (male) comparisons. But this modification isn’t enough to counteract what women do when they are in the same situation. Lower-earning women still do about twice as much housework as guys when they are the lower-earning partner. Gender roles are changing, but sticky.

The question is why are lived gender roles sticky and slow to change even when people’s personal gender attitudes appear to be changing? Thébaud used cross-national data from 18 countries to learn whether something in the larger culture could explain why we keep seeing this housework/doing gender pattern.

Sure enough, in countries where breadwinning, paid work, and earning a good income are more highly valued (as measured by a “work culture index”), even lower-earning men are more likely to resist doing housework. It wasn’t that the men were necessarily personally invested in any kind of gender stereotype, but where the larger culture emphasized the importance of earning and paid work, men did less housework no matter what. So, for example, the Netherlands had a lower work culture index and Dutch men who earned less than their (women) partners added more housework hours. Meanwhile, in Slovenia, which has a higher work culture index, the men performed no additional housework when they earned less than when they earned more.

The way Thébaud explains it, “Although men may do more housework on average in contexts where women have a stronger presence in the labor market…my results suggest that the ongoing pressure for men to live up to breadwinning expectations remains strong and has the power to considerably restrict the degree to which they engage in unpaid work.”

In case you were wondering: countries that were higher on the work culture index weren’t higher on productivity or GDP. But, other aspects of cultural context are more encouraging. Studies, like this one, have shown that men in countries where more women are in the workforce do more housework.

–Virginia Rutter

Jeeze. Just read this at Talking Points Memo. I don’t want to talk about it. Just swear. WTF?!

-Virginia Rutter