Presenter: Dongxue Su
Co-Presenters: Yaoying Zhang
Faculty Mentor: Julia Heffernan
Presentation Type: Oral
Primary Research Area: Social Science
Major: Educational Foundations
Authors: Lisa Wade (An associate professor of sociology at Occidental College in Los Angeles); Myra Marx Ferree (the Alice H. Cook Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.)
During the development of families, there are lots of inequalities between genders. In this project, we will focus on how institutional pressure influence both men and women in different ways, and the relationship between children and parents. Normally, men spend more time on breadwinner and women focus on housework and parenting in pop culture and conversation. For single parents and families with two working parents, that work is second shift, work that greets us when we come home from work (P248). Childcare and housework still carry the gendered meaning they did when breadwinner/housewife family were considered ideal. We need to think about social construction of children care and housework and look at the actual and the ideal division of labor in family today. Women are less happy than men in marriage, then, because it is an institution that systematically presses them into doing the low- status domestic work of our society. On the other hand, we also need to focus on children and family’s relationship. For example, if the child always stay with their mom that this child will love their mom more than their dad. And parent’s relationship also can affect their children thinking about the family relationship.