Frontmatter -- Contents -- Illustrations and Tables -- Acknowledgments -- 1. Introduction -- 2. "Naturally I Believed I Would Get Married": Making the Choice -- 3. Navigating Work and Welfare -- 4. Legal Discrimination against Unwed Mothers -- 5. Are Unwed Mothers "Immoral" or "Impressive"? The Role of Social Stigma and Shame in Upholding Family Norms -- 6. "The Worst Child Abuse Is the Absence of a Parent": The Role of Guilt -- Conclusion -- Appendix -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index
Voice assistants (VAs) like Amazon Alexa have been integrated into hundreds of millions of homes, despite persistent public distrust of the company. The current literature explains the spread of voice assistants despite the low levels of trust in big technology companies through users' limited concern about or even resignation to surveillance. Through in-depth, semi-structured interviews (n=16) we explore how young adult Alexa users make sense of continuing to use the VA while generally distrusting Amazon. We identify three strategies that participants use to manage distrust: separating the VA from the company through anthropomorphism, expressing digital resignation, and occasionally taking action, like moving Alexa away from a particular location or even unplugging it. We argue that these individual-level strategies allow users to integrate Alexa into domestic life, despite their concerns. We conclude by discussing the implications these individual choices have for personal privacy and the rapid expansion of surveillance technologies into intimate life.
In this article, the authors argue that to understand the very low incidence of outside-of-marriage childbearing in contemporary Japan one needs to take into account perceptions of all possible solutions to a premarital pregnancy: marriage, abortion, and childbearing outside wedlock. To demonstrate the particular impact of these perceptions in Japan, the authors compare them with those in the United States, a country where many more children are born outside wedlock. Using mixed methods, the authors demonstrate that for a typical Japanese woman, giving birth outside marriage is the morally inferior solution. For many American women, in contrast, choosing to bear a child outside wedlock rather than rushing into a marriage or having an abortion is often seen as a sign of greater maturity. These preferences play an important role in maintaining the norm of childbearing within marriage in Japan and also contribute to our understanding of how this norm has waned in the United States.
Background: Previous research suggested that husbands' participation in housework is positively associated with fertility choices for both women and men. We tested this association by using data of four East Asian countries. Objective: This paper examines whether the positive association between gender-equal sharing of housework participation and fertility intention in China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan has strengthened between 2006 and 2012. Methods: We harmonize two datasets, the 2006 East Asian Social Survey and the 2012 International Social Survey Programme. We employ OLS and ordered logit models estimators to test the association between husband's housework participation and the ideal number of children. Results: In both 2006 and 2012, husband's participation in housework is associated with both own and partner's fertility intentions in 2006 and 2012. The association between the domestic division of labour and fertility has not changed between 2006 and 2012. Conclusions: Corroborating the findings of our earlier paper the results suggest that a more gender-equal domestic division of labour in East Asia is associated with higher fertility intentions in this region. The gender revolution framework offers a plausible explanation for the East Asian fertility trends between 2006 and 2012. The findings suggest that there is a stall in the pace of the gender revolution. Contribution: This paper provides a summary of the trends highlighted by the contributors to this special issue. This is also the first paper to look at the evolution of domestic division of labour and fertility preferences in four East Asian countries over time.
This paper investigates the gendered division of labor in different types of domestic work within married couples in contemporary Japan. We analyze routine housework such as cleaning and cooking, non-routine housework such as home repairs, and care work by using the 2016 Survey of Time Use and Leisure Activities (Japan's national time diary survey). Our core analysis is done using ordinary least squares (OLS) regressions on total domestic work time, routine housework time, non-routine housework time, and care time. We find that women's domestic work time dwarfs men's, and there is some variation by day of the week and education. On weekdays domestic work is almost exclusively the domain of women. On weekends we find evidence of compensatory behaviors for both men and women. Men, especially those with university education, catch up on all types of unpaid work while women, especially those with tertiary education, catch up on unpaid work mostly by spending more time caring for children. Looking at the family balance in sharing domestic labor we find that men increase their time on unpaid work on weekends proportionately more than women do. Consequently, within couples, wives' share of all types of unpaid work is around 10% smaller on weekends compared to weekdays. In couples where wives have tertiary education, there is an additional reduction by several percentage points in their weekend share of domestic work time compared to weekdays. Our findings suggest that Japanese men's long work hours contribute to gender inequality in domestic work participation. We also find that university education is associated with more equal sharing of domestic workload, indicating that socialization may play a role in bringing about greater egalitarianism in the domestic sphere in the future.
This report aims to provide basic facts about gender inequality in income, time use, and wellbeing before and during the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK. We compare employment, income, time use, and well-being figures reported before and during the lockdown period (late March to April 2020) of the same group of individuals by analyzing longitudinal data from the 2020 UK Household Longitudinal Survey (UKHLS) COVID study and the full UKHLS data. Earlier studies on the topic are based on cross-sectional data with different survey designs and sample selections.
- Women undertake the major share of housework and childcare and form 80% of the health and social care workers who are more exposed to the virus, among people aged between 20 to 49.
- There was a 30% reduction in paid work time for both women and men, and the percentage was 45% among non-key workers. Women and men experienced a similar amount (3-4 hours) of an increase in weekly housework hours. We also note a comparable reduction in monthly labour income for women and men.
- Women, especially mothers experienced a more dramatic decline in well-being amid the COVID pandemic.
- Single mothers fare the worst in the labour market, are the least likely to own a house, have a car in the household, and have the highest risk of depression, which makes them particularly vulnerable in the current circumstances. Single parents experience the largest 7% increase in the non-working rates during the lockdown period.
- Childcare support is critical when the usual support networks, such as grandparents, friends, and neighbours, can no longer help with childcare, especially for mothers.
Unpaid household work is vital for human reproduction and enables all other forms of work. However, debates about the "future of work" have yet to address unpaid work. In this article, we present first estimates of the impacts of "smart" and "AI" technologies on unpaid work. We ask what the likelihood is of various types of unpaid work being automated, and how this would change the time spent on domestic work and on the gendered division of labour. To achieve this, we adapt three established automation likelihood estimates for paid work occupations to estimate the automation likelihood of 19 unpaid work tasks. Applying these estimates to Japanese and UK national time use data, we find that 50-60% of the total time spent on unpaid work could be saved through automation. The savings are unevenly distributed: a woman aged 20-59 in Japan could save over 1,000 hours per year, whereas men in the UK could save 600 hours and men in Japan only 250 hours. Domestic automation could free up to 9.3% of women in Japan and 5.8% of women in the UK to take up full- or part-time employment, pointing to substantial potential economic and social gains from domestic automation.
The "future of work" has emerged as a prominent area of future making. Regardless of how accurate predictions about automation turn out to be, they are influencing present-day policies. In this article we expand the debate to unpaid domestic work, which so far has been excluded. We report on a forecasting exercise in which 64 AI experts from the UK and Japan estimated how automatable are 17 housework and care work tasks. Unlike previous studies, we draw on sociological and feminist literature to understand how experts' diverse backgrounds may shape their visions. On average the experts predict that 39 percent of the time spent on a domestic task is automatable within ten years. Japanese male experts are notably pessimistic about the potentials of domestic automation, a result we interpret through gender disparities in the Japanese household. Without dismissing the practice of forecasting entirely, we demonstrate how predictions are socially contingent.
