Column

Sun Shiyu, Academic Researcher and Specialist Researcher, Faculty of Education, Hokkaido University

While much research on roles focuses on the "equal division of labor" between spouses, my research findings draw attention to whether the division and adjustment of roles are even possible in the first place. Here, I would like to talk about my research, focusing on cooking, which is one of the household roles—household chores and childcare—while also touching on my own life.

People eat every day. Some people enjoy cooking, while others find it a chore. I belong to the former group, and I'm confident in my cooking skills because I've cooked often. Even so, when I buy a bag of three carrots while living alone, I'm faced with a dilemma: either I eat carrots every day like a rabbit, or the carrots wither away in the corner of the refrigerator. Cooking requires ingenuity and effort. Also, while meals are important for managing one's health, it's difficult to find the time to cook when you're busy with studying or research. In this way, cooking, as well as housework and childcare, varies depending on each person's skills, ingenuity, and available time.

So what happens when you live with just two people? It seems to get a little easier because you can share the chores.

In my research, to clarify what happens in the division and adjustment of roles among dual-income couples, I interviewed husbands and wives separately to dynamically capture the process from marriage and cohabitation to the time of the survey. What I found was that cooking for two people requires less effort than cooking for one person simply by adding more ingredients, and when neither of them feels like cooking, they order out or delivery, and it's not a problem to skip a meal if they don't have an appetite. Thus, for couples before having children, household chores are postponed and are easy to share and substitute.

However, once children are born and the household becomes a family of three or four, the long-term effects of factors that were not so noticeable when it was just the two of us become apparent. As more couples with young children enter the workforce, the division of household roles becomes an even greater challenge. In fact, previous research has shown that only couples without children are able to achieve an equal division of roles that is not defined by traditional gender divisions. My own research, which targeted dual-income couples who are generally thought to have a high degree of equality, yielded the same results as previous studies in that housework and childcare are disproportionately borne by wives. However, this is not necessarily because husbands are uncooperative. Combining the stories I gathered from both husbands and wives in my research, the reasons why housework and childcare become disproportionately borne by wives after children are born are twofold: (1) the nature of household roles changes as a result of raising children, making deferral, sharing, and substitution impossible, and (2) husbands and wives do not have the same level of skills, experience, and resources regarding housework and childcare.

Regarding (1), once a child is born, parents must feed them regularly and prepare meals according to their growth and likes and dislikes. This not only makes it impossible to postpone housework and childcare, but also increases the amount of work and demands higher quality. However, in dual-income couples, both husband and wife act at their own pace to efficiently manage housework, childcare, and work within limited time, and their practice of fulfilling their roles is not always synchronized.

Regarding (2), if one partner in a couple is in charge of cooking, or is on leave and staying home for a certain period, that person is solely responsible for planning menus, shopping, managing ingredients and inventory, storing condiments, and cooking frequently, so their cooking skills tend to be higher than their partner's. In addition, one partner often comes home earlier to pick up the children and learns more about the children's favorite foods and seasonings while cooking. Even with the promotion of gender equality and the increase in women working full-time, in the case of married couples, it is still more often the wife who can come home earlier. The fact that children often "nominate" the wife for cooking and she cannot be relieved of her role as cook illustrates the long-term effects of these small differences in coming home time and differences in cooking skills.

Thus, the division of roles among dual-income couples tends to become rigid as children are born and grow up, a trend that has been confirmed cross-culturally in my field research in East Asia. From now on, I would like to proceed with the discussion by focusing on the possibility of adjusting the division of roles.

(reference)
Doctoral dissertation abstract: "The Division of Roles Between Spouses from a Power Perspective: Focusing on Dual-Income Families with a First Child of Preschool Age," Hokkaido University Academic Collection (HUSCAP)
URL: https://eprints.lib.hokudai.ac.jp/dspace/handle/2115/78892　　

(Original article)
OPENeD, the National Diversity Network website
　→https://opened.network/
Published September 2, 2020: Sun Shiyu, "Division of Roles for Working Couples Raising Preschool Children - A Life Experience Starting with Cooking"
　→https://opened.network/column/column-0016/