Explain gender stratification in family life.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Answers will vary. Among parents with children under age 18, fathers spend more hours each week in paid work than do mothers, do less child care and housework, and have more leisure time. Many household chores are still gendered. On average, men are three times more likely to do home repairs and maintenance (e.g., repairing cars, lawn care); women are three times more likely to do the never-ending jobs like cooking, cleaning, and laundry (Wang, 2013; "American Time Use Survey…," 2015).Women do less housework than they used to but devote twice as much time to child care as men, and there are gender differences in parenting tasks. Fathers tend to do more of the enjoyable tasks (e.g., reading to children, playing with them, taking them to games) and are much more likely to "join in" with child care than to "take over" from mothers. In contrast, mothers do most of the daily, never-ending tasks like picking children up from school or day care and feeding, bathing, and putting them to bed (Parker and Wang, 2013; Craig, 2015).Every year, the media feature and applaud stay-at-home dads, but their numbers are negligible. In 2016, 209,000 fathers (0.2 percent of all fathers) cared for children while their wives worked outside the home. Being a stay-at-home dad is usually a temporary role that's due to unemployment or health problems. The greatest increase, however, has been among white, college-educated, middle-upper class men who choose to be stay-at-home dads because their partners or wives have high incomes ("Father's Day . . .," 2015; Kane, 2015).