Transcription
Welcome back, everyone! Hope you all had a relaxing, restorative break.
I don't really have too many housekeeping items. Your sociological autobiographies have all been marked; feedback is on OWL. For any specific questions, please contact Lori.
We have a reminder that we do have our second midterm on Monday, February 10th. That will also be through ProctorTrack and OWL. Hopefully, I'll have everything worked out, so just be aware of that.
This semester, we're looking at more specific things that can impact family dynamics. Last semester, we took a broader look, asking questions like, "What is a family? What do they look like? Why do people get married?" This semester, as I said, it's more of a deep dive into specific topics.
We'll start off by looking at work and asking, "What is work, and how does it impact the family?" Specifically, we'll look at both paid work and unpaid work, and some of the gender differences there. We'll examine the effects of unemployment, ask what housework is and what it constitutes, and look at role expectations and changing roles.
We'll also explore the connections between paid and unpaid work and ask why we should care about gender differences. Through this, we'll discuss how gender differences are still very much prevalent, with different expectations for different genders. Finally, we'll conclude by talking about flexible working arrangements and the impact that something like that can have.
To start off, I want to say that for decades, sociology itself was really only concerned with paid work and men's work. Housework, which is a key form of unpaid work, wasn't really seen as work nor was it viewed as worthy of study; it was just sort of taken for granted.
However, since the 1980s, there has been immense interest in the study of paid and unpaid work. We are starting to write past wrongs and realize that unpaid work is just as important, valid, meaningful, and significant. Crucially, since then, more and more families have been affected by the interplay between work and family responsibilities.
A significant societal trend we've seen is the increase in the number of women employed outside the home. In contrast, the labor force participation rate among men aged 15 and older has actually been declining very slowly. New research falls under gender divisions of labor in paid and unpaid work.
We ask questions like, "Who is doing work inside and outside of the home? How much work are they doing? How is this shaping and reshaping family dynamics?"
If we look at this chart, for instance, we can see both the uptick in women's employment—that's the percentage of women aged 15 and older who are in the labor force—and the decline in men's employment. We can see how women have gone from just over a third of the labor force to just under half.
This nice-looking table is from 2016, so it is a bit dated. More recent data have shown a slight decline for both men and women. What are some of the consequences of this in terms of family dynamics? How does having both parents in the labor force, for instance, affect children, for better and for worse? These are some of the questions that sociologists ask and some of the topics that we'll be exploring today.
Originally, paid work was described as the standard employment relationship—usually full-time, usually with the same employer. It was described as one of 48 hours for 48 weeks for 48 years, or the male model of employment. This reflected a gender bias.
But why? How is it gendered? This definition of paid work doesn't mention men. So what gives? The thing is, jobs were originally meant for one person. One person was supposed to be able to provide for their family, while the other took care of things at home.
So, you know, 48 hours per week for 48 weeks a year for 48 years. Now we have more of 40 hours a week or 37.5 hours a week, but maybe there's overtime. Certainly, expectations have changed since the original standard employment relationship was developed.
It was developed by and for men, again with the expectation that women would stay at home and take care of the family and the house. If you're finding that you and your spouse are both in the labor force and you need both incomes to survive, you come home, you've got kids, the house needs cleaning, and you're exhausted. You're wondering how people do this all the time.
The truth is, it wasn't originally intended that way. It was originally intended that one person be able to financially provide for the whole household while the other took care of things. You are literally doing the work of two people.
Again, we won't necessarily get into the whys of that, but sometimes you need both incomes, and it's no one's fault necessarily. But there's a reason why we can feel overwhelmed with this.
Women's participation in paid work has increased significantly, both out of interest and necessity. Where wages have gone down or remained stagnant, we need a second source of income, and women want to work. In 2015, 82% of all Canadian women aged 25 to 54 had jobs, which is up from 21.6% in 1950.
There have also been sharp increases in the employment rate of women with children. While these figures for women's employment have steadily increased, it's important to note that during the COVID-19 pandemic, women's employment went from being at a historic high to its lowest in 30 years between February and July 2020.
They're still fluctuating now and looking to stabilize, although they have gone down a bit since then. We can look at some of the gender differences in this paid work. We know that more and more women are going out and working in the labor force, but straight up, women earn less than men in the labor market.
In 2019, Canada had the seventh highest gender wage gap out of 28 countries in the OECD. Just for your information, the OECD stands for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. It includes 38 total countries that are all basically in the global north.
I say "basically" because both Mexico and Colombia are in it, which is debatable as to whether or not they're in the global north. But there are no African countries in the OECD, and the only Asian countries are Japan, South Korea, and Turkey, if you count Turkey as Asian.
You don't need to know that for the exam or anything; I just wanted to give you context about what the OECD is because I know not everyone is familiar with it. These are highly developed "quote-unquote" countries, and of them, Canada had the seventh highest gender wage gap.
The point here is that the wage gap in Canada is quite high compared to other countries of a similar stature. The gender wage gap for women workers in Canada varies from women earning 69.7 cents for every dollar earned by men to 88 cents for every dollar earned by men, depending on how it's calculated.
There's a lot of debate about what actually causes the "quote-unquote" gender wage gap. As with any complex issue, the answer is also likely complex. If you hear people say, "No, it's simple; it's this," like "women are just doing X" or "men are just doing Y," beware of complex problems that have simple solutions.
Because again, there's likely more to the story, and there certainly is with something like the gender wage gap. There are several factors, from traditional women's work "quote-unquote" paying less than men's work to more women working part-time than men, and also the possibility of sexism.
The University of Waterloo did a study on the gender wage gap and found a gap of about $3,000 across faculty. This is people doing the same work at the same university. They controlled for all sorts of different variables, like part-time status and years of experience, and still found a small but very significant gap.
A similar thing happened at Brescia in 2018, back when it was still around. They found that while two-thirds of Brescia's faculty was female, which was the highest proportion in the country, they earned the second lowest salaries in Ontario at the time.
Again, it's a highly contentious topic, and there are a lot of possible explanations, even beyond the ones we discussed. It is interesting, and again, it's something that sociologists are interested in and trying to explain. But we've got to look at a lot of different factors.
As I explained earlier, the labor market itself has sort of male connotations because historically, it's been mainly men who worked full-time, continuous work. Women are more likely than men to engage in part-time work, especially those in what's called the sandwich generation.
So they're caring for both children and elderly relatives. You've probably come across this term in another class, but "sandwich" refers to how there's care going from both sides, and they feel a bit stuck or "sandwiched" with having to work and having to care.
It can be a lot; it can be really overwhelming. In these situations, oftentimes something has to give, and that something can be work. Again, switching to part-time, for instance, in order to manage these care expectations.
We can see here the employment rate for women by the age of the youngest child, where women with children under six years old are the most likely to not be employed, reflecting the burden of caregiving.
Now, let's transition to some other trends. We know that there are some gender differences here, and we're also seeing the rise of what's called non-standard employment. This is also known as contingent or precarious employment.
These are part-time, temporary, or self-employment roles in which women, men under 25, new immigrants, and racialized individuals are all overrepresented. These are precarious roles. You can think of something like an Uber driver, where their boss "quote-unquote" is an algorithm.
It's not full-time necessarily; it could be if they work enough, but it's up to them and the algorithm to decide how much money they actually get. The algorithm could change; maybe you're making $10 per delivery, and then the algorithm says, "Nope, actually, we're changing it to $7 per delivery," and you've got no say over that.
There's no union, no real employment contract guaranteeing you certain hours or rights or anything like that. Similarly, we're also seeing work contracts where instead of a full-time job, you'll get a contract for four months, six months, or a year. Beyond that, you're on your own.
The precarious nature of these types of employment translates into greater vulnerability for those engaged in them. We saw this especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, but the trends continue.
We're also seeing different effects regarding unemployment. Unemployment has a financial impact on the family, but the impact can extend far beyond that. Family well-being itself can depend on how family members think about unemployment and their strategies for dealing with both practical and emotional needs.
It's not just the financial loss that people have to cope with or deal with. People experience a series of reactions to job loss. First, there's usually a bit of shock and denial, especially if a layoff is unexpected. Then comes anger, followed by worry and anxiety, and finally, a sense of anticipation when they start a job search.
Unemployment can often undermine a person's self-esteem. If, for instance, a man or his family holds the traditional value that a man provides financially for the family, losing a job means not only is he unable to provide financially, but effectively, he has failed as a person.
That's just one example; obviously, it's not just men who experience the devastating effects of unemployment. But in terms of social expectations, this can tie into things.
Next, we're going to talk a bit about unpaid work. We talked a little about paid work and participation in the labor force, but we're pretty clear about what that is, whether it's precarious or not. The definitions and meanings of unpaid work are a bit more difficult to pin down.
There are many different ways of categorizing unpaid work. Most sociologists agree that there are several dominant types: housework, which includes taking care of things in and around the house; childcare; community and inter-household work; and elder care.
We'll start by looking at housework. It's not a universal or homogeneous category; it has changed greatly in the 21st century. Technology has helped with this a lot, whether that's washers and dryers, microwaves, or better vacuums like Roombas.
The degree to which housework is oppressive or burdensome can be based on income, family structure, and the amount of time spent on housework. Household work is related to income levels, age, gender roles, quality of housing, and personal standards for meal preparation and cleanliness.
Then we get to unpaid care work or childcare. It's closely linked with housework, but it's not quite the same. It's still considered familiar work. Compared to housework, this hasn't been as significantly impacted by technology.
There's a lot less flexibility here than when it comes to housework. You can let the dishes sit in the sink overnight, but you can't let your kid go hungry for a night. It's also easier to hire someone to come in once a week for a couple of hours to do a good bulk of some of the housework.
However, if you hire someone once a week for a couple of hours to do childcare, not much is going to get done. They'll get three hours' worth of care done, but that's not going to set you up for the rest of the week.
So, less flexibility hasn't been as significantly impacted by technology, and the responsibility is still overwhelmingly women's. The shift from wage-earning husbands to dual-earner families has not meant an equal shift in household responsibilities.
Rather, in large part, it's led to conflicts over how household work and childcare should be divided. It's still seen as women's work, even when women are in the workforce as well. Long-held societal assumptions suggest that children are best off at home and looked after by their mothers.
Again, women disproportionately take on the burden or role of childcare. Daycare centers are actually a relatively new phenomenon; they were only really established when it benefited society, either from the desire for better supervision of children or from the need for mothers to join the workforce.
So, it only really came about because we needed women in the workforce, and thus we needed daycare. Childcare can be either regulated or unregulated. Unregulated care is provided by someone other than the parents or immediate family members who isn't necessarily licensed.
When I was little, there was a neighbor in town who, I don't know, I'll have to ask my parents if she ever actually got registered. The story was that she was just a stay-at-home mom. She had a daughter my age and two older sons.
She stayed at home while her husband Bob was a mechanic. That was fine; she was going to stay at home and take care of Andrea. My mom had other childcare plans that fell through, and she begged Grace, with tears in her eyes, to look after me and Andrea so she could go back to work.
Grace agreed, and then word got around that Grace was good at babysitting. She became the neighborhood babysitter. I don't know if she was actually licensed or not, but she was great. She would drive us around town, and we met her mom.
She would have all sorts of activities and games planned for us. I think I turned out okay! But that's unregulated care, provided by someone in the neighborhood who said, "Yeah, I can watch her, no problem."
Regulated care is usually center-based, where services are provided by college-trained or, in some cases, even university-trained early childhood educators and must meet certain provincial standards.
In the past decade, there has been a modest increase in the number of regulated spaces Canada-wide, although it's still difficult to find and still very expensive. In 2019, space was only available for about 27% of Canadian children aged 0 to 5 years old.
Those are the most recent stats I could find, but according to StatsCan, just over half—52%—of Canadian children younger than six were in licensed or unlicensed childcare in early 2022. It's a bit higher in Quebec and a bit lower in Manitoba. You don't necessarily need to know that; I just thought it was interesting.
There are several factors affecting the choice of childcare, including the age of the child, trust in the care provider, and the location of the daycare. With the exception of Quebec, many families have problems with the cost of childcare.
The sort of $10 daycare promised by the federal government is still in the works, as far as I can tell. I've tried to figure out where things are at, and for me, who is not a parent, it is very confusing. I can only imagine it's even more confusing if you are a parent looking to put your kid in childcare.
The changes in availability and cost of daycare also affect women more than men because, as we've talked about, they're still expected to provide the bulk of the care. Childcare in Canada is described as resting on four pillars: government funding, income tax relief for families, maternity and parental leave and benefits, and universal and free kindergarten.
The reason for these different types and levels of childcare is partly that there is no real national policy on childcare, and social and political attitudes towards such care are mixed. Some folks say, "Well, daycare slots are already limited. If we make it $10 a day, more people are going to want to put their kids in childcare. Where are they going to go?"
Also, "Who's going to pay for it? We're already in a deficit." But then others say, "We clearly need something like childcare. It's so prohibitively expensive for some people that some folks who would want to work are forced to drop out and sacrifice their careers, and that's not okay either."
So it's a really tricky, complicated issue with a lot of different opinions all around. Finally, one interesting note: since men traditionally have not had to concern themselves as much with family care, some view housekeeping chores as unmasculine.
Husbands tend to do the highest share of housework when partners' earnings are equal. I've talked about how women's entering the workforce hasn't necessarily led to a proportionate balance of women doing fewer household chores.
It is interesting to note that this is not true across the board; it's truest when income levels are equal. Then there's community and inter-household work. This is an extension of both housework and childcare.
This refers to extra domestic, community-based responsibility for children. It's the work of parents and others described in various ways as kin work, service work, mother work, household service work, etc.
This could be a form of unpaid labor, but it's almost even more hidden unpaid labor. For example, if you want to get together with your family for Christmas, who plans that? Who plans the menu? Who decides who's staying where? Who organizes things? Usually, it's women, but not always.
That's the sort of community work. Or if you want to get together with your neighbors, planning that. Kids have sports practice, and we need to make sure that my kid is supposed to bring a snack for his team.
So, I'm going to make sure there are snacks to go around. Oh, Aunt Debbie's birthday is today. I should make sure to send her a text. Oh, got to remember to get a present to send. That's the kind of work we're talking about.
It's outside the home but still effectively care work in that we're caring about others and caring about the community and building our community. Finally, we get to elder care.
As baby boomers age, there will be a growing need for elder care services in Canada. There is a growing recognition from policymakers that the aging-in-place movement has had unintended negative consequences for family members who care for seniors.
As with childcare, women are more likely than men to bear a disproportionate burden of elder care. They're more likely to miss work, for instance, as a result of elder care responsibilities.
Of note is that Indigenous seniors are nearly twice as likely to be living with extended family members compared to non-Indigenous seniors. There's this term called filial piety, which is a term from Confucian philosophy that refers to the respect, obedience, and care for parents and elderly family members that Indigenous people are more likely to subscribe to.
There are also financial issues that can play a role in that as well. Most seniors want to live at home as long as possible. I thought this was really interesting. In 2020, a national survey showed that as many as 96% of Canadians aged 65 and older reported that they would do everything they could to avoid going into a long-term care facility.
Governments also support the concepts of home care and aging at home, or aging in place, since these are less of a burden on the public purse. This means instead of going into a nursing home, we stay at home.
Maybe we hire a caregiver to come in once a week, once a day, or twice a day. Maybe we don't at all; maybe we just have our kids check in on us or our neighbors check in on us periodically. Aging in place refers to not going into a long-term care facility when needs start to increase.
In 2018, almost one quarter of seniors aged 65 and older—about one and a half million people—provided care or help to family members with a long-term condition, such as a physical or mental disability or problems related to aging.
That's just folks aged 65 and older providing care to others, so you can see that the burden is still there. It can be a lot. I would have liked to have shown some short videos about this, but for whatever reason, I can't get the videos working.
The Government of Canada has actually put out a series of short videos on caregiver loneliness in Canada. Taking care of an elderly and aging spouse can be a really isolating experience.
There's this person; they're your world, but all of a sudden, they're checked out. They're not quite there anymore, and the need can be almost constant. It can be really draining.
Click on the link. If the video doesn't work, the transcript should work. If you can't watch the video, at least read the transcripts.
So, shifting gears now to talk a bit more about role expectations, which we've touched on a little in some of the earlier parts of the lecture. When it comes to elder care and care in general, women take on a disproportionate burden.
Some women feel that they're in a lose-lose situation when it comes to work and childcare. If they stay home, they're failing to live up to their potential as a worker, as someone who can bring in an income. But if they work outside the home, they fear being criticized for neglecting their children.
That being said, while couples do still favor the man's career, this trend is not as strong as in the past for heterosexual couples. Given the many demands on their time, dual-earner couples often spend relatively little time with friends and family.
Extended family, in particular, places greater demand on the nuclear family to meet all of the social and emotional needs of its members. When and where social networks are limited, as they are in these types of scenarios, families may experience lower levels of social support and thus feel higher levels of stress.
With the current dual-earner, dual-income model we have, it doesn't leave a lot of time for socializing. Of course, socializing is really important for our mental health. We are seeing people suffer as a result of not being able to form and develop those connections.
As for how we know what we know, it wasn't really until the 1970s or even into the 1980s that unpaid work was accorded mention within academic studies, especially sociology. A lot of the early studies included that men did little unpaid domestic work, but these studies didn't fully investigate men's roles in domestic work.
Data relating to time, tasks, and responsibility reveal constant movement and change in the gender division of labor. It's not static. There are different levels of time, tasks, and responsibility that play out differently in different generations.
More recently, gender differences have narrowed, but gender ideologies do play a role. It's been interesting to see the rise of so-called "tradwife" TikToks and social media channels, where women are espousing that it's good and beneficial for women to be traditional homemakers instead.
For the past several decades, we've seen more and more women entering the workplace. It'll be interesting to see what the trends are with respect to things starting to swing back the other way, whether this is just a one-off or whether the trend will continue.
Next, I want to look at some of the connections between paid and unpaid work. There's this notion of public and private spheres, and what happens in one is separate from what happens in another. This was an idea promoted by Talcott Parsons.
If any of you had me for intro or if any of your other intro classes talked about it, Talcott Parsons was also famous for popularizing the notion of the sick role—what happens to people when they get sick and how we as a society justify them dropping out of the workforce temporarily.
He developed this concept called the "cell," but that's not relevant here. I just wanted to let you know that if that name sounds familiar, that might be where. But Talcott Parsons also developed the concept of the public and private spheres.
However, the dichotomy is problematic. Low-income women, for starters, have always worked outside the home to support their families. This notion of the traditional housewife speaks more to middle-class and upper-class families.
Women and men have always been employed as workers and homeworkers. Men have, throughout history, certainly done their share of housework. The divide is not as strong or as stark as we might believe.
Women's experiences of paid and unpaid work also cannot be treated as entirely separate things. Consider, for instance, the category of stay-at-home fathers, where some men are very active in the private spheres.
Connections need to be drawn between homework and state policy. One positive aspect of state support for parenting is Canada's generous parental leave policy. Families can take up to a year at 55% of their regular salary, depending on the province and job.
There are some weaknesses in that it is tied to Employment Insurance, so you have to be employed in an organization. If you're working for yourself, that's a different issue. It's a lot harder to take that leave, and you have to have been working for a certain amount of time—one year—to get that EI.
There are also provincial differences, particularly between Quebec and the rest of Canada regarding parental leave, not paternal leave, and also Indigenous people's access to parental leave. Parental leave is available to everyone, men or women.
Throughout class, we've been talking about how there are still these really strong, stark gender differences in terms of expectations in paid and unpaid labor. For the rest of class, I want to ask the question: Why does this actually matter?
It may seem self-evident, but it may also not be self-evident. Perhaps you're reading this thinking, "Well, we should get back to the traditional model; that was working." The issue of concern is not the difference per se, but the disadvantages that follow from it.
There are personal costs to women, in particular, of the gender imbalance and the cost of caring. There are costs to men as well, which we can talk about. Unpaid labor on the side of women has been very costly to paid work opportunities for many women, and not everyone is disadvantaged by this equally.
We can look at income differences in particular. If it's financially available to you, you can hire someone to do the cleaning, to help with caretaking, and so on. Someone of a lower socioeconomic status may not have that available to them.
Gender differences in unpaid work can also make a difference for men. They can lose out on bonding activities, for instance, with both their kids and their spouses. They may lose the opportunity to cook a meal with their spouses if they feel like that will make them unmanly.
There may also be lost social opportunities in that they may feel stigma associated with something, so they don't want to do it. Or they do it and get mocked by their friends, told, "Oh, you're just whipped; your wife's got you doing all this and that." That's a problem as well.
One way to help with these differences is through flexible working arrangements, aka flex time. This didn't actually originate during the COVID-19 pandemic, but the possibility of it was thrown into the national spotlight.
Flex time starts with a system of working a set number of hours within the starting and finishing time, and then employees can agree on how those hours actually get worked. For instance, if you're working your eight-hour shift, I saw this happen all the time with my work with refugees.
My co-workers would have an eight-hour shift, but then they would have clients come in from overseas at 5:00 p.m. So they would stay past 4:30 p.m., greet them at 5:00 p.m., get them settled, do a quick orientation, and then get home with work at around 7:30.
Those extra three hours they worked could be taken off on Friday. It's flexible. They could say, "Actually, I've got an appointment I need to get to next week, so I'll take an hour and a half from those extra three hours I worked."
Women with flexible working schedules, in particular, feel less stressed by family responsibilities than those with more rigid schedules. Workers who use this benefit more often tend to have school-age children, where kids have ever-changing needs, whether that's field trips, illnesses, or something else.
Another option is to have a compressed workweek. This is a work schedule based on working longer shifts over fewer days, such as working four 10-hour days instead of five eight-hour days. This can be good, but long hours can also contribute to exhaustion and burnout.
The hours may make it difficult to look after family needs on working days. Going from 8 to 6 is a long day, and by the end of the day, you're kind of done. Telecommuting or working from home is a work arrangement where an employee works outside the office, often from home but not necessarily always.
This appeals to a lot of folks—people who commute long distances every day, who don't want their children to spend 10 or more hours a day in childcare, who want to sleep in a bit more, or who just want flexibility to schedule daily work.
Working from home definitely has its benefits, but the need to be constantly connected means that we're never really off the job. It can be a lot harder to close your laptop and be done for the day.
Canada does have a right to disconnect or right to disengage, but not all employers are aware of that, and not all employers care. This arrangement can actually be linked to lower family satisfaction.
Studies have shown that with the dramatic rise in telecommuting or working from home during COVID-19, burnout actually increased. Finally, part-time work is also an option. It allows individuals to fulfill care responsibilities for children or older relatives.
As we talked about, women, much more so than men, choose to work part-time or choose to work fewer hours. This sometimes takes the form of job sharing, which is a work arrangement where two employees share one full-time job with prorated salaries and benefits.
That's all I have for today. There are no discussion questions this week; they'll resume next week, so just a heads up for that. As always, let me know what questions you might have, and take care!