Joan Williams' Unbending Gender: Why Family and Work Conflict And What To Do About It (Oxford, 1999) is a "theoretically sophisticated and thoroughly accessible treatise" that offers a new vision of work, family, and gender. (Publisher's Weekly, Nov. 1, 1999) It examines our system of providing for children's care by placing their caregivers at the margins of economic life. This system that stems from the way we define our work ideals, notably from our definition of the ideal worker as one who takes no time off for childbearing or childrearing and who works full-time and is available for overtime. The ideal-worker norm clashes with our sense that children should be cared for by parents. The result is a system that is bad for men, worse for women, and disastrous for children. Williams documents that mothers remain economically marginalized, and points out that when mothers first marginalize and then divorce, their children often accompany them into poverty. Williams argues that designing workplaces around the bodies of men (who need no time off for childbearing) and men's life patterns (for women still do 80% of the child care) often constitutes discrimination against women. She also engages the work/family literature to show that "flexible" workplaces are often better than existing practices for employers' bottom line. On the family side, she argues that the ideal worker's wage -- after as well as before divorce -- reflects the joint work of the ideal worker and the primary caregiver of his children, and should be jointly owned. In a comprehensive examination of the theoretical issues surrounding work/family issues, she uses the work of Judith Butler and Pierre Bourdieu to explain why gender has proved so unchanging and unbending, reframing the special treatment/equal treatment debate, the debate over "women's voice," and offering new perspective on how to avoid the persistent race and class conflicts that emerge in debates over work and family issues.

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Unbending Gender: Why Family and Work Conflict and What To Do About It (Panel Two: Who's Minding the Baby?)

This paper provides a timely evaluation of whether the main COVID-19 lockdown policies – remote work, short-time work and closure of schools and childcare – have an immediate effect on the German p...

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/14616696.2020.1833066

The COVID-19 pandemic and subjective well-being: longitudinal evidence on satisfaction with work and family

Work-Family Conflict

Objective The COVID-19 pandemic is more than a public health crisis. Lockdown measures have substantial societal effects, including a significant impact on parents with (young) children. Given the existence of persistent gender inequality prior to the pandemic, particularly among parents, it is crucial to study the societal impact of COVID-19 from a gender perspective. The objective of this paper is to use representative survey data gathered among Dutch parents in April 2020 to explore differences between mothers and fathers in three areas: paid work, the division of childcare and household tasks, and three dimensions of quality of life (leisure, work-life balance, relationship dynamics). Additionally, we explore whether changes take place in these dimensions by comparing the situation prior to the lockdown with the situation during the lockdown. Method We use descriptive methods (crosstabulations) supported by multivariate modelling (linear regression modelling for continuous outcomes; linear probability modelling (LPM) for binary outcomes (0/1 outcomes); and multinomial logits for multinomial outcomes) in a cross-sectional survey design. Results Results show that the way in which parents were impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic reflects a complex gendered reality. Mothers work in essential occupations more often than fathers, report more adjustments of the times at which they work, and experience both more and less work pressure in comparison to before the lockdown. Moreover, mothers continue to do more childcare and household work than fathers, but some fathers report taking on greater shares of childcare and housework during the lockdown in comparison to before. Mothers also report a larger decline in leisure time than fathers. We find no gender differences in the propensity to work from home, in perceived work-life balance, or in relationship dynamics. Conclusion In conclusion, we find that gender inequality in paid work, the division of childcare and household work, and the quality of life are evident during the first lockdown period. Specifically, we find evidence of an increase in gender inequality in relation to paid work and quality of life when comparing the situation prior to and during the lockdown, as well as a decrease in gender inequality in the division of childcare and household work. We conclude that the unique situation created by restrictive lockdown measures magnifies some gender inequalities while lessening others. Discussion The insights we provide offer key comparative evidence based on a representative, probability-based sample for understanding the broader impact of lockdown measures as we move forward in the COVID-19 pandemic. One of the limitations in this study is the cross-sectional design. Further study, in the form of a longitudinal design, will be crucial in investigating the long-term impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on gender inequality.

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'Intelligent' lockdown, intelligent effects? Results from a survey on gender (in)equality in paid work, the division of childcare and household work, and quality of life among parents in the Netherlands during the Covid-19 lockdown.

This important book assesses the level of unreliability—random measurement error—in individual survey items found in general-population surveys, on which much scholarship in sociology and kindred fields depends. Duane Alwin aspires to reduce measurement error at its source by identifying less error-prone methods of constructing and administering surveys. His study contributes to understanding survey quality by showing how reliability varies with item content and instrument design; many findings provide empirical grounding for well-established survey practices, while others suggest that some common data collection protocols may heighten error. The study rests on an original, unique data base of reliability estimates for nearly 500 individual survey items drawn from longitudinal surveys representing well-defined populations. Questions included measure both basic sociodemographic facts and subjective phenomena (beliefs, attitudes, selfperceptions). Alwin coded item properties (number of response alternatives, length), question content (factual or nonfactual), and survey context (inclusion in a topical series or ‘‘battery’’ of related questions, ordinal position within a questionnaire), and then assessed associations between these design features and reliability. As befits a study of data quality, much of Margins of Error justifies the measurement of its dependent variable, item reliability. Three chapters that outline and critique extant approaches to reliability assessment can be read profitably on their own. But the key here is that Alwin seeks reliability measures for single survey items, not composite scales. He stresses the distinction between multiple measures (verbatimreplicated items) and multiple indicators (distinct items related to a common underlying construct). He finds widely-applied ‘‘internal consistency’’ approaches based on classical test score theory (coefficient a) wanting, because they estimate the reliability of multiple-indicator composites rather than individual items, and because such composites need not be ‘‘univocal’’—that is, they combine indicators that often have imperfectly correlated true scores. A particular difficulty is that those methods understate item reliability by classifying stable, but measure-specific, variance in a survey response as erroneous rather than reliable. Alwin argues that cross-sectional designs cannot adequately estimate the reliability of single items, because respondent memory raises correlations among multiple measures or indicators. He advocates longitudinal designs that administer identically worded questions on at least three occasions, suggesting that those measurements be separated by intervals of up to two years to avoid memoryinduced inflation of reliability estimates. When these demanding data requirements are met, suitable analytic methods can distinguish reliability and stability, and incorporate stable item-specific variance within true score variance. Many results substantiate widely-used and -taught guidelines for constructing survey instruments. For example, reliability tends to be higher for factual questions than for items measuring subjective content, for selfreports than for proxy responses about others, and (usually) for shorter questions. In keeping with much recent methodological research on survey data, Alwin invokes cognitive considerations to interpret such associations; he suggests, for instance, that respondents may better comprehend short questions, and more readily access and retrieve information needed to answer factual ones. Of particular note is Alwin’s finding that the widespread survey practice of presenting items in batteries—sets of consecutive questions using the same response format—tends

Dividing the Domestic: Men, Women, and Household Work in Cross-National Perspective:

Part-time work is an increasingly common strategy for handling work and family – but is it an effective strategy everywhere and for everyone? To answer this question, we examine satisfaction with w...

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Janin Eckner

Papers

Part-time work and gender inequality in Europe: a comparative analysis of satisfaction with work–life balance

When does part-time employment allow managers with family responsibilities to stay on the career track? A vignette study among German managers