gender: marriage/family

Way back in June my friend Abby Kinchy let me know about an article in the New York Times by Stephanie Coontz, a scholar best known for her book The Way We Never Were, which addresses myths about the “traditional” family. The article is about no-fault divorces and their pros and cons. What struck Abby were the accompanying images, which depict two hypothetical break-up letters (to “John” and “Jane”) that include a list of stereotypes about men and women, what they want out of marriage, and why they fight.

The Dear John letter:

So women want to break up because they feel stunted in their marriage (they miss out on experiences, they’re bored, they want to travel), they are still hung up on old flames, they want kids and their male partners (of course) don’t, and they just might be lesbians.

The Dear Jane letter:

What do men stereotypically want to leave their female partners for? Being emasculated (“you make me feel like less of a…”), men aren’t supposed to be monogamous (“it’s not natural for a man to be mono…”), they want more sex with more people, women spent too much money shopping, or their wives get stupid haircuts.

There is some gender agreement, though; neither men nor women can take a spouse who gets fat.

UPDATE: Citizenparables thinks the images are more playing on those still-existing stereotypes:

Perhaps the point of the images is rejecting – crossing out – those cliche stereotypical excuses, which are by implication false (because surely they can’t all be true!), leaving the essential idea that when someone leaves a relationship it’s a choice, pure and simple, which they ought to own rather than blame on either themselves or the partner.

The New York Times has a neat interactive graph based on data from the American Time Use Survey that lets you look at hour-by-hour time use broken down by sex, employment status, 3 racial/ethnic groups (White, Black, Hispanic), age, education, and number of children (though, unfortunately, you can’t search by more than one category at once). Here is the breakdown for the entire sample:

For people age 15-24:

Watching TV and movies takes up a lot of the time of those over age 65:

You can also click on a particular activity to get more information about it:

Those with advanced degrees spent the most time participating in sports or watching them in person; I suspect that the data might look a bit different if time spent watching sports on TV went in this category instead of the TV category:

Just a note, the averages for time spent at work seem pretty low, but that’s because they’re averaged over all days of the week, including any days off, rather than only days a person actually went to work.

Presumably the amount of time you’ll spend playing around with the site goes under computer use.

Jenny Knopinski snapped these photos of the new Safeway brand of baby care products, Mom to Mom.  The branding of the product as “for moms, by moms” is another great example of the way that mothers are held responsible for childcare, while fathers are simultaneously excluded from the sphere altogether.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Women spend their young and young adult lives dreaming of their wedding day, or so the stereotype goes.  Where might girls get the idea that weddings are a particularly important day in a woman’s life?

SociologicalMe sent in a wedding day toy for girls found at a Pathmark grocery store in Delaware:

And Mary, who blogs at Disney Princess Recovery, collected these examples of Disney Princess-themed wedding books for little girls:

So maybe it isn’t part of having two XX chromosomes.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

According to this 1935 ad for canned corn, the key to a man’s heart is his stomach.  Mr. Thomas T. Twiggers was a miserable husband, so miserable that Mrs. Thomas T. Twiggers booked a trip to Reno for a quickie divorce.  But then she fed him Niblets canned corn.  With proper feeding, a man and a marriage can be happy as can be!

Vintage Ads.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Reflecting the expectation that it is women who will do the majority of the child care, men’s bathrooms frequently do not have baby changing tables.   This particular bathroom at the Baltimore airport, however, is an exception.  Notice anything odd?

Thanks to Corey O., Monique P., and eaglevision for the submission!

See also our post on stick figures and stick figures who parent.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Rose saw the ad below in a free UK parenting magazine.  She thought it was a great example of how an ad sometimes pays “lip service to being inclusive and PC, while [including] numerous elements [that] make it obvious that it isn’t what they really intend.”

So, yes, the ad specifies that the event is for “mums, dads and carers” and it’s nice that they went that far to include them.  But the event is clearly for mothers or women carers and their girl children (and, more specifically, the transfer of feminine training from mother to daughter).  The color of the ad, the feminine shoes with bows, the title (“Mummy Mornings”), and the feminized activities (including “beauty sessions” and the chance to be “spoilt”) are all elements that mark this as for-girls-only.

Is it better to include dads as an afterthought?  Or should we just acknowledge that we’re organizing parent/child activities around mothers (and in this case, daughters)?

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Dimitriy T.M. let us know about the Bureau of Labor Statistics American Time Use Survey website, which has lots of fascinating information. The ATUS data for 2009 was just released but they don’t have charts available yet, so I’m presenting data from 2008 here.

This shows daily time spent in various activities for women who are married and have children under 6 living in the home, by their employment status:

They didn’t provide a similar breakdown for married men, oddly.

Hours spent daily on household chores, by sex (but not broken down by employment status):

The difference in hours spent on household activities is interesting, but since it’s not broken down by employment, and women are less likely to be employed full-time than men, it doesn’t really tell us to what degree this is women doing a “second shift” vs. household management as their primary activity, so that’s sort of annoying.

Volunteer activity by sex and age (notice that the columns represent the average daily % of the population who volunteered, not the number of hours they spent volunteering, and the data is an average for 2004-2008):

This isn’t surprising, given that social scientists have generally found that women do more volunteer work, more regularly, than men (again, I’d like to see this broken down by employment status).

It’s also interesting that men and women who volunteer tend to do different types of activities. As this graph shows, it mimics the indoor/outdoor household chores pattern we see in family life. Women are more likely to do food preparation, while men are more likely to do maintenance. Also, men seem somewhat more likely to have leadership positions or to attend skills-building activities, while women do organizational stuff:

For both men and women, volunteering is most common for those with school-aged children in the household, indicating that a lot of volunteering is probably for child-centered organizations such as sports teams and PTA meetings:

I was somewhat surprised by the relationship between volunteering and educational level. The percent of people who volunteer goes up with more education, but the hours spent volunteering per day goes down:

Though the daily difference isn’t huge (just a half hour less for those with a 4-year college degree and those with less than a high school degree), over the course of a month or year it would certainly add up.

If you go through the raw data files, I’m sure there are all types of interesting relationships that give more detailed information about sex, employment status, and time usage. A fun way to waste time if you ever need a procrastination tool.