Gendered Household Labor Distribution & Morality: Social & Moral Reasoning about Household Chores in Chinese & South Korean Families

Scholars have found that while women across cultures do on average 66% of all household labor, only 20-30% of women find these gendered distributions unfair. As scholars concerned with moral development, gender equality, and household functioning, we need to study the processes underlying the observed tension between the apparent inequality in housework distribution and the belief by family members that such distribution is fair and acceptable. A limitation of previous research has been that scholars mainly focused on only one of the members of a household’s evaluations of gendered housework and primarily concentrated their research within the United States. In order to address these methodological limitations, this dissertation employed interviews, surveys, and observations of family meal preparations to investigate all the members of 12 Chinese and 12 South Korean families’ social and moral reasoning about their own households’ labor distribution. Furthermore, the home is where children first begin to learn about issues of justice and gender. Therefore, developmental implications were explored through interviews and surveys with133 children, half from each country, investigating how they made sense of their homes’ division of housework as well as their developing understandings of fairness. Consistent with previous research, mothers in both countries were reported as doing the majority of housework. As anticipated, Korean mothers were reported as spending more time on housework than Chinese mothers. In line with this finding, Korean children and parents were statistically more likely to find their own family’s division as unfair compared to Chinese participants. However, consistent with previous findings, only 39.58% of parents in both countries found their own family’s division as unfair. Surprisingly, while the great majority of children (81.2%) found a hypothetical scenario in which the mother did the majority of housework as unfair, children were split when it came to evaluating their own household, and only 47.7% of children found their family’s division unfair. Interestingly, no gender differences in fairness evaluations were found. Unexpectedly, interviews revealed that 20.83% of parents found their division neither fair nor unfair, and instead believed that it was reasonable. Thematic analysis of family interviews revealed that many parents in both countries did not believe that fairness should be used to evaluate a family’s division of housework. However, both children and adults who evaluated their division as fair were more likely to employ time-availability as a rationale for why mothers did more housework. This study’s findings have several implications. One, children in both countries did not significantly differ from their parents in how they perceived the amount of each family member’s involvement in their family’s housework distribution. Two, equity served as a justification for considering smaller proportions of inequality fair, while larger inequalities were considered unfair. Therefore, rather than relying on conventional norms to accept inequality, individuals employed moral justifications in their evaluations of the fairness of a gender unequal household labor division. Three, children’s and adults’ evaluations and reasoning regarding hypothetical scenarios differed significantly from their assessments regarding their own family’s situation. This suggests the need for future research to go beyond relying on only hypothetical scenarios to investigate individual’s evaluations of social issues, since individuals may be less morally critical of real situations than previously suggested from studies relying solely on moral evaluations of hypothetical situations. Four, individuals do not appear to connect their individual experiences of inequality with structural inequities. Educational efforts to encourage critical thinking should consider both domain-based moral educational approaches as well as critical pedagogical approaches. Finally, the results suggest that previous research was misleading in the assertion that the majority of adults find their division fair. Instead, in at least 20% of the cases, adults in both countries are not evaluating their division through an assessment of fairness at all. Future research should investigate how individuals coordinate not only moral concerns of fairness and conventional norms, but also values of intimacy and affect, which may at times take precedence over moral considerations