Culture, gender and care – 06/16/2023 – Policies and Justice

In no country in the world do men and women spend the same amount of hours on work related to unpaid care, such as housework and care for children and the elderly. What’s more, women spend three times as much time as men on this job, on average.

The birth of a child generally increases women’s workload at home, accentuating the unequal division of care tasks.

Inequality in the division of unpaid care work is one of the factors that explain gender disparities in the labor market, such as the lower participation of women and the receipt of lower wages in relation to men, even when they have similar skills for the job. same job.

More recently, some studies have sought to understand the causes of these inequalities in the division of household chores. One of the explanations found is related to cultural issues about the responsibilities attributed to men and women in this care work, defined by “customary, ethnic, religious and/or social beliefs and values, which are transmitted from generation to generation”, according to with Luigi Guiso, Paola Sapienza and Luigi Zingales.

Evidence shows that cultural issues affect the way men and women make decisions about studying, working and starting a family, for example. We can understand this effect by looking at the difference in decisions among immigrants from other cultures who moved to the United States. Several studies show a strong relationship between women’s decision to enter the workforce and the corresponding female participation rate in the country of origin.

Therefore, the question arises whether these cultural issues affect the individual preferences of men and women, or do they just represent a social determination that affects their choices? To better elucidate this point, we again examined studies with immigrants exposed to different cultural values.

The literature demonstrates that differences in decisions between men and women can disappear over time, after exposure to different cultures, suggesting that individual preferences can change slowly.

Another evidence in this regard are the effects found in simple interventions to increase the participation of women in predominantly male areas —whether they are affirmative actions more directed towards a greater presence of female role models, or mentoring programs and support networks. These interventions have resulted in an increase in female participation in such areas, again showing that individual preferences can change in the face of stimuli.

The complexity of the problem is directly related to its magnitude. Thus, successful policies in this area must be born out of an in-depth understanding of where differences in gender norms come from and the complex processes that have brought us to where we are today.

The editor, Michael França, asks each participant of the space “Politics and Justice” of the Sheet suggest a song to the readers. In this text, the one chosen by Paula Carvalho Pereda was “Sisters Are Doin’ It For Themselves”, by Eurythmics and Aretha Franklin.

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