"He's the provider and I'm the home-maker"
How gender role ideology is measured and why I think it doesn't capture the complexity of two people in a hetereosexual relationship just trying to survive
Nearly two years ago I left my ‘proper’ academic job and went freelance. It’s given me that extra bit of time I need to focus more on what I really want to do (work with the stories I have gathered from women for the Women of Ireland Project). But freelance work is, by nature, unreliable and haphazard and, as I don’t earn an income from the Women of Ireland Project itself (that’s my passion project), the floor under my feet, the roof over my head and the food in the fridge is unequivocally provided for by my husband.
I’ve found that really hard.
It’s hard for a variety of reasons — from how it’s altered my personal identity to the financial stress that comes with freelance life — but the foremost challenge has always been that I feel like I am (or I fear that I will be accused of) ‘letting the sisterhood down’. Because possibly the worst thing you can do as a woman these days is conform to ‘traditional’ gender roles (we’re supposed to be breaking our way out of them) and you certainly should never, ever find yourself in a position where you have to (financially) rely on a man.
Passing onlookers might categorise me as ‘home-maker’ and my husband as ‘provider’. He is out of the house, for days at a time, earning the money that supports us while I’m working from home (and I’m cleaning, and cooking, and doing the garden, and looking after the dog, and sorting all the life admin, because I’m there). The public/private divide is pronounced in our relationship, and we have both, over these last two years, gradually fallen into the classic male/female roles of a heterosexual married couple.
And there are times when I negatively judge myself for it.
All of this was percolating in my head the other day as I read through some research papers on gender role ideologies and how people’s attitudes to them are measured12. The usual and most long-standing approach has been to measure, and characterise, gender role attitudes as something that exists on a singular linear continuum — going from ‘traditional’ on the one extreme and ‘egalitarian’ on the other. ‘Traditional’ is the view that men should earn the money while women provide the care and do the unpaid work of the home, while the ‘egalitarian’ view holds that men and women (in a heterosexual relationship) are jointly responsible for earning household income and doing the unpaid domestic tasks. Moving society closer to the ‘egalitarian’ end of that continuum has been where attitudinal change efforts have been focused for decades.
Yet, this more recent research argued that such an approach — of measuring gender role attitudes on one singular continuum — is old-hat. It’s not sensitive enough to really capture the multifaceted and complex nature of people’s attitudes to gender roles. Instead, these studies were advocating for a move towards viewing and measuring gender role attitudes as multidimensional; recognising that one individual could simultaneously hold various attitudes to gender roles depending on the context or sphere in question. For example, the same person could believe that both men and women should have the right to earn equally, but that caring roles should be the responsibility of women rather than men, or that both men and women should share unpaid ‘domestic’ work in the home equally.
Newer research… [finds] that gender role attitudes no longer appear on a unidimensional scale ranging from “traditional” to “egalitarian”. Instead, gender role attitudes should be understood as a multidimensional concept, which consists of different characteristics independent of each other. For example, individuals may believe that in a romantic relationship both partners should contribute to the household income. At the same time, however, they may be in favour of women being the main caregivers for children.
Sabine Düval (2023): Do men and women really have different gender role attitudes?
I thought of several of the women I have interviewed, and how this ‘multidimensional’ aspect plays out in their stories. Women who are highly educated, have successful careers, and then return home to ‘their second job’ in the domestic realm. The new and young mothers who describe how much they dread the ‘Are you going back to work’? question because they know they’ll be judged either way: ‘Isn’t it well for some!’ if they’re not or, ‘And who will be minding the baby’!? if they are. And just the general relentlessness that so many women talk of as they try to spin all the plates; run their homes and run their careers. While the paid work dimension is more egalitarian than ever (and Ireland is repeatedly praised for how much it has improved on this) the unpaid labour of the domestic realm remains well and truly female in Ireland. The EIGE’s most recent Gender Equality Index Scores show that women in Ireland continue to spend more time engaged in caring activities and housework than men and that women in employment have less time for social activities:
Yet, as I read on, I found myself questioning whether measuring people’s attitudes about gender roles and who ‘ought’ to do what (even if the science is trying to do better at it) really explains anything meaningful about people’s lived realities?
Before I quit my ‘proper’ job, my bread-and-butter as a social scientist was understanding human behaviour and how to change it. And in the diverse fields of the human behavioural sciences, it’s well recognised that attitudes are a weak predictor of behaviour. The disparity between what people say they will do and what they actually do is known as the ‘Attitude—Behaviour gap’.
“Could the focus on attitudes (and measuring them and picking them over and trying to change them which is what a lot of gender equality policy tends to centre on) be causing us to shine a light on the wrong things”? I wondered.
And I say this as I think of my own situation.
If both my husband and I were to be surveyed right now on our attitudes to gender roles I know we would score as highly ‘egalitarian’. Neither he nor I believe that either gender ‘ought’ to be more responsible for certain dimensions of life (like earning, or caring, or doing household duties), yet if you were to come visit and hang out with us for a week, and watch what each of us do, you could be forgiven for assuming that we both hold ‘traditional’ attitudes about gender roles. We are the classic heterosexual marriage (minus the children who we couldn’t afford anyway even if we wanted any, but that’s a different, if not unrelated, story); my husband is the bread-winner-provider and I am the jack-of-all-trades, working from home, aspiring author, sometimes academic and researcher, and general household manager with sporadic, unreliable income (i.e. a ‘home-maker’). Yet, we have not adopted these roles because of attitude but because of circumstance.
Part of the reason why attitudes are such a poor predictor of behaviour is because humans are so heavily influenced by our environment; the specifics of the situation and the context we find ourselves in and what that environment signals to us (which in turn can activate things like our emotions, and interact with other drivers of behaviour like social norms, past experiences, mental shortcuts, habits, etc. etc. affecting our behaviours). While attitudes tend to be quite stable, behaviours are not; you can walk into a different environment and have your behaviour change because of that environment. It’s why so many of us, for example, act differently around friends compared with work colleagues.
I’ve noticed how our behaviours have changed, my husband and I, as our situation has these last few years. It’s been subtle but not necessarily slow. From the moment he became the primary provider of household income (which began when he walked past my study one day and saw the state of me and said ‘Just do it, just quit your job, it’ll be okay’) he rose to it. It’s as if some latent, ancient genetic code was suddenly activated and a whole way of thinking that previously lay dormant was unleashed. Provision was his primary focus and he was going to do it well. And, in all honesty, I can see that it suits him. It’s given him a renewed sense of purpose. Going to work is no longer just about putting in the hours; he’s intrinsically motivated by supporting me and the work I do and it’s given a whole new meaning to the long, exhausting, frustrating days he has to put in, in a dark, artificially lit office.
As for me, well, I was always house-proud, but now that I spend 99.9% of my time at home and can set my own schedule that aspect of my character has become an even more potent feature of my daily life. I like a clean and tidy environment and know how to keep it that way. I can make a meal from just about anything and bake whatever I can find a recipe for (I do enjoy that). I can remember appointments and dates and important events without the need for a calendar, which (unfortunately) makes me good at ‘life admin’. And, above all, I have high standards and like things done a certain way, which invariably means I’d rather do it myself (i.e. I’m controlling about it).
Attitude has nothing to do with why we are this way — circumstance has, and how those circumstances have, so clearly, activated our classic gender conditioning. But the ‘modern’ me doesn’t want to fully admit that these are the roles we have fallen into (and especially not the fact that we are both really good at it), and that’s why I judge myself so negatively on it.
Our situation is specific and unique to us. It appears ‘traditional’ but is based on an ‘egalitarian’ desire to always support the other; their dreams, aspirations, hopes and desires. I cook and clean while he is away for days at a time doing the one thing I have repeatedly proven to myself I cannot do — work in ‘The Machine’, go out and do the grind, the 12-hour days in an office, the long commutes — and he’s doing it so I can focus, not on the demands of an employer, but my own research passions (i.e. The Women of Ireland Project). How we divide the multifaceted mosaic of all the contributing components of our relationship (our life together) is not equal, but it is interdependent, and we both value that even if (a capitalist) society (that devalues the unpaid work of the home) does not.
No study of ‘gender role attitudes’ could ever capture the motivating factors, the complexity, and the human story of two people just trying to survive and support one another along the way. While this is the situation we find ourselves in now it will likely change again in the future; maybe I’ll be the primary provider while he pursues one of his passions, or we’ll both contribute equally to the household income, who knows? But what I do know is that our behaviour will never remain static, we will always change and adapt to meet the needs we face and do the things we need to do, even while our attitudes remain stable.
Yet, women, everywhere, are exhausted. While collective attitudes to gender roles have largely continued a slow (slower for men than women) but steady march towards being more ‘egalitarian’ since the 1970s, it’s clear that women remain the primary care-givers and home-makers, regardless of whether they contribute solely, equally or partly to the household income (and the Covid pandemic brought that into sharp refrain3). I can’t help but wonder how much more revealing it would be if, instead of focusing on measuring people’s attitudes about gender roles, we dedicated more time to understanding the complexities of the domestic, private sphere, and how and why it so strongly activates a sense of female responsibility and duty in so many (even when that’s not their attitude about gender roles).
As a friend recently explained to me in a voicenote exchange that completely blew my mind (for how it was such a simple yet radical point, and I had never thought this way before); we dedicate an awful lot of time to progressing women’s involvement in and equality within the public sphere but have almost entirely ignored how to positively involve men in the private.
Speaking with all honesty, as someone fortunate enough to be in a loving and supportive relationship with a man (a man who holds ‘egalitarian’ views about gender roles), such an act would require me to give up or reduce the significant amount of control I wield over our home environment. Even though it’s a control rooted in the fact that I am a woman and have been conditioned to ‘have high standards and enforce things being done a certain way’, releasing some of that grip seems terrifying. Terrifying but radical.
But what might happen if I did?
Düval, S. (2023). Do men and women really have different gender role attitudes? Experimental insight on gender-specific attitudes toward paid and unpaid work in Germany. Social Science Research, 112, 102804. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssresearch.2022.102804
Grunow, D., Begall, K., & Buchler, S. (2018). Gender Ideologies in Europe: A Multidimensional Framework. Journal of Marriage and Family, 80(1), 42–60. https://doi.org/10.1111/jomf.12453
Flor, L. S., Friedman, J., Spencer, C. N., Cagney, J., Arrieta, A., Herbert, M. E., Stein, C., Mullany, E. C., Hon, J., Patwardhan, V., Barber, R. M., Collins, J. K., Hay, S. I., Lim, S. S., Lozano, R., Mokdad, A. H., Murray, C. J. L., Reiner, R. C., Sorensen, R. J. D., … Gakidou, E. (2022). Quantifying the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on gender equality on health, social, and economic indicators: A comprehensive review of data from March, 2020, to September, 2021. The Lancet, 399(10344), 2381–2397. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(22)00008-3
Yes! Yes! Yessss! Loved this .... I've done a lot of reading and learning about the masculine / feminine from an energy perspective... because energy is simply energy... there's no bias, prejudice, agenda, right or wrong... it just is... and... energy is both masculine and feminine in nature.... the masculine Polarity being one of action and movement, the feminine Polarity being one of receptivity and creativity.... one is interdependent on the other.... and so when I've wanted to understand my own basic needs as a woman and how that relates to reality... I look at the untainted natural dance of energy and the polarities and what each needs.... David Daiida in his book Intimate Communion does a better job of explaining this dance....but what I've learned us the masculine and feminine have natural roles... and while we fight for more 'equality' really what I feel we have missed is... it's not equality we really seek... because, personally speaking, we are NOT equal... man equals man, woman equals woman, but man does nor equal woman and woman does not equal man.... they cannot be the same... they are polarities... SOOOOO.... what are we seeking? Fairness!! I feel we have gotten lost in a battle for equality that doesnt exist and have gotten off track in realising what we, especially as women, have been seeking is fairness.... and the freedom that fairness and the opportunity to rebalance offers... we seek balance through that fairness.... and in knowing that balance in itself is not a stagnant state but an ever-changing point, then .... in this post what I see and feel is a couple 'relating' to each other 'balancing' each other.... whether that means you're at home and he's working or vice versa... the dance is balance, relating, fairness, and in that attitudes can be that which ensures the balance remains fair... rather than the behaviour alone.... love it!!!