Survey research finds that mothers suffer a substantial wage penalty, although the causal mechanism producing it remains elusive. The authors employed a laboratory experiment to evaluate the hypothesis that status-based discrimination plays an important role and an audit study of actual employers to assess its real-world implications. In both studies, participants evaluated application materials for a pair of same-gender equally qualified job candidates who differed on parental status. The laboratory experiment found that mothers were penalized on a host of measures, including perceived competence and recommended starting salary. Men were not penalized for, and sometimes benefited from, being a parent. The audit study showed that actual employers discriminate against mothers, but not against fathers.

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Getting a Job : Is There a Motherhood Penalty?

According to the perspective developed in this article, widely shared, hegemonic cultural beliefs about gender and their impact in what the authors call “social relational” contexts are among the core components that maintain and change the gender system. When gender is salient in these ubiquitous contexts, cultural beliefs about gender function as part of the rules of the game, biasing the behaviors, performances, and evaluations of otherwise similar men and women in systematic ways that the authors specify. While the biasing impact of gender beliefs may be small in any one instance, the consequences cumulate over individuals’ lives and result in substantially different outcomes for men and women. After describing this perspective, the authors show how it sheds newlight on some defining features of the gender system and illustrate its implications for research into specific questions about gender inequality.

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Unpacking the Gender System A Theoretical Perspective on Gender Beliefs and Social Relations

In this article, we assess how the concept of cultural capital has been imported into the English language, focusing on educational research. We argue that a dominant interpretation of cultural capital has coalesced with two central premises. First, cultural capital denotes knowledge of or facility with “highbrow” aesthetic culture. Secondly, cultural capital is analytically and causally distinct from other important forms of knowledge or competence (termed “technical skills,” “human capital,” etc.). We then review Bourdieu’s educational writings to demonstrate that neither of these premises is essential to his understanding of cultural capital. In the third section, we discuss a set of English-language studies that draw on the concept of cultural capital, but eschew the dominant interpretation. These serve as the point of departure for an alternative definition. Our definition emphasizes Bourdieu’s reference to the capacity of a social class to “impose” advantageous standards of evaluation on the educational institution. We discuss the empirical requirements that adherence to such a definition entails for researchers, and provide a brief illustration of the intersection of institutionalized evaluative standards and the educational practices of families belonging to different social classes. Using ethnographic data from a study of social class differences in family-school relationships, we show how an African-American middle-class family exhibits cultural capital in a way that an African-American family below the poverty level does not.

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Cultural capital in educational research: A critical assessment

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Are Parents Investing Less in Children? Trends in Mothers' and Fathers' Time with

“Is Anyone Doing the Housework?” (Bianchi et al 2000) was motivated, like much of the research on housework, by a desire to better understand gender inequality and social change in the work and family arena in the United States During the 1990s, Arlie Hochschild’s (1989) influential book, The Second Shift, provided the dominant assessment of the gender division of labor in the home (Konigsberg 2011): men were unwilling to share the burden of work in the home and thus employed women came home to a “second shift” of housework and childcare, increasing gender inequality Her rich qualitative study was based on a small sample of unknown generalizability, however (Milkie, Raley, & Bianchi 2009)

The collection and release of the large and nationally representative 1987–88 National Survey of Families and Households (NSFH) unleashed a flurry of housework articles in the quantitative sociological literature The NSFH had the advantage of reports of housework from both members of a couple and husbands’ and wives’ assessments of fairness in the household division of labor, but these data could not provide the trend analysis critical to the understanding of social change that time diary data collections allowed “Is Anyone Doing the Housework?” used the NSFH but also presented analysis of the only nationally representative data available – time diaries – with which to assess trends in housework and broaden the discussion of how women and men might be reallocating time in the home during a period of rapid change in women’s work outside the home

The citation count in Google Scholar stands at 910 citations (as of April 20, 2012), with those citations continuing to the present1 In the article, we showed that the gender division of labor in housework became more equal over this period, in part because men increased their time in housework but more importantly because women dramatically decreased the time they spent in these activities Men increased their propensity to do housework and the increase was not a result of change in population composition, whereas for women it was a mix of decreased likelihood of doing housework but also an increase in the proportion of women least likely to spend time in housework (eg, employed women) We compared time diary data to the NSFH, demonstrating that the NSFH survey questions resulted in estimates that were about 50 percent higher than time diary estimates but that both data sources yielded similar conclusions about the gender gap in housework Finally, using the NSFH data, we provided a multivariate description of the correlates of wives’ housework time, husbands’ housework time and the gender gap in housework time of married couples The findings remain relevant today, save the need for the update of trends provided here

Using time diary data for 1965, 1975, 1985 and 1995, our observation window on housework was one in which the pressure on women to “shed load” to accommodate increased market work was high and in which the pressure on men to “pick up some of the slack” was perhaps also high Our data analysis spanned the 1970–90 period of greatest labor force increases for US women, particularly married women with young children Subsequent trend analyses of women’s labor force participation, housework and childcare in the 1990s showed much less increase and a leveling off in rates by the end of the 20th century (Sayer 2005; Sayer, Bianchi, & Robinson 2004), causing some to argue that the gender revolution was over (Cotter, Hermsen, & Vanneman 2011)

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Housework: Who Did, Does or Will Do It, and How Much Does It Matter?

While women are expected to be nurturing and unselfish in their role as mothers, they are expected to be competitive and even ruthless at work. Drawing on ideas about mothering since the Middle Ages, on contemporary childrearing manuals, and on in-depth interviews, Hays shows that 'intensive mothering' is a powerful contemporary ideology. These unrealistic expectations of mothers, she suggests, reflect a deep cultural ambivalence about the pursuit of self-interest.

The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood

Dramatic changes in family life in the latter half of this century have meant that seven in 10 mothers now work in the paid labor force, the majority of two-parent families are now dual-earner families, and three in 10 households are now single-parent households (Hochschild, 1997; U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1995). Despite these revolutions in family life and despite continuing efforts for gender equality, the task of childrearing remains primarily the responsibility of mothers. The fact that 88% of single-parent households are headed by women provides one obvious marker of this reality (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1995). Research on dual-earner families provides further confirmation: Mothers, on average, are responsible for 74% of the total parental hours spent in direct child care (Ishii-Kuntz & Coltrane, 1992), None of this information is news to the majority of readers of Journal of Marriage and the Family. But what we should find surprising in this context are the extraordinarily demanding childrearing prescriptions and maternalist assumptions represented by the recently published "Parents' Socioemotional Investment in Children" (Bradley, Whiteside-Mansell, Brisby, & Caldwell, 1997). Bradley et al. participate in the perpetuation of a series of powerful yet outdated cultural assumptions regarding the "proper" relationship between mothers and children. What Bradley et al. ultimately offer us is a series of taxing and exacting prescriptions for completely selfless, constant mother care. These demands, however, are cloaked in gender-neutral verbiage and the language of science and objectivity. Bradley et al.'s explicit aim is to test the validity of a new research instrument they designed, the Parental Investment in the Child Questionnaire, referred to as the PIC. Many of the questions on the PIC are drawn directly from extant forms that measure parent-child "attachment," and all the items on the PIC are derived from existing psychological theories of appropriate parental behavior. The PIC is, nonetheless, distinct and particularly useful, the authors explain, because it is expedient and efficient and because, unlike most research questionnaires in this genre, the PIC measures the parents' experience of attachment, rather than the child's experience of attachment. For these two reasons, Bradley et al. expect the PIC to be useful in parental education programs. After providing a theoretically grounded rendering of the importance of parents' investment in children, the authors dedicate most of the article to laying out their methodology and statistically demonstrating that the PIC is, overall, internally consistent and reliably correlates with connected measures of parent-child attachment and measures of mental, familial, and social health. Hence, Bradley et al. conclude, the PIC is a "valid" as well as useful measure of parents' socioemotional investment in their children. At first glance, this looks like good science. As a research instrument, the PIC follows directly from the scientific findings of its predecessors. The authors appear to have a solid grasp of the "objective" research in this genre, and the statistical methods they use for testing the consistency and validity of the PIC appear sound. But there are three central problems with the argument made by Bradley et al.: one regarding the neglect of existing methodological and theoretical critiques of attachment theory and two involving the cultural assumptions and social implications involved in the development and use of the PIC. First, Bradley et al. do not address the longstanding criticisms of attachment theory that arise out of debates within psychology and that have been rendered and extended in the work of Diane Eyer (1992). Second, sociologists and others will notice that the PIC prescribes a model of parental behavior so demanding that it would be extremely difficult for even the most dedicated stay-at-home parent to follow and virtually impossible for single paidworking parents or dual-earner couples. …

Sharon Hays

Papers

The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood

The fallacious assumptions and unrealistic prescriptions of attachment theory : A comment on parents' socioemotional investment in children