Gendered Divisions of Paid and Unpaid Work in the UK

Professor Wendy Sigle is Head of the Department of Gender Studies at the London School of Economics and teaches courses on social policy and population studies. Wendy has worked on a variety of issues related to families and family policy in historical and contemporary societies.  Applying theoretical contributions and insights from gender theory and feminist epistemology, Wendy’s  research critiques how quantitative methods are applied and how quantitative evidence is used and interpreted in social research. A key concern is how taken for granted approaches shape policy logics and policy design.

 The increasing prevalence of different-sex couples where the woman is more highly educated and/or the higher earner has been suggested as a potential mechanism for more egalitarian division of labour over time. Including age gap and prior parenthood history as further indicators of relative power, this paper tests and critiques the predictions of standard bargaining models. Incorporating a forward-looking element of potential earnings trajectory, we also extend the literature predominantly focused on static bargaining models. Using the first sweep of the UK Millennium Cohort Study (MCS), a large-scale survey of parents with babies aged 9 months, we employ classification and regression tree (CART) analysis to investigate whether families with particular ‘atypical’ characteristics have more egalitarian housework, childcare and paid work. We found that these ‘atypical’ family profiles are indeed related to slightly more egalitarian arrangements, but ‘more egalitarian’ groups were either very small or their arrangements differed only slightly from the sample average.

This webinar is part of an open seminar series, hosted by CISC and CWOS. To discover more please visit the Centre for Intimate and Sexual Citizenship and follow the Centre on Twitter

SC199 Career Development and Making a Difference

Essex students within the department can attend this event as part of eligibility criteria for module SC199. Once attended, you can complete a short reflection on what you learned by attending the event. This can be downloaded on Moodle and then uploaded to FASER.