This analysis uses nationally representative time diary data from 1965, 1975 and 1998 to examine trends and gender differences in time use. Women continue to do more household labor than men; however, men have substantially increased time in core household activities such as cooking, cleaning and daily child care. Nonetheless, a 30-minute-per-day free-time gap has emerged. Women and men appear to be selectively investing unpaid work time in the tasks that construct family life while spending less time in routine tasks, suggesting that the symbolic meaning of unpaid work may be shifting. At the same time, access to free time has emerged as an arena of time inequality.

Gender, Time and Inequality: Trends in Women's and Men's Paid Work, Unpaid Work and Free Time

Care work is done in the home as well as in markets for pay. Five theoretical frameworks have been developed to conceptualize care work; the frameworks sometimes offer competing answers to the same questions, and other times address distinct questions. The “devaluation” perspective argues that care work is badly rewarded because care is associated with women, and often women of color. The “public good” framework points out that care work provides benefits far beyond those to the direct recipient and suggests that the low pay of care work is a special case of the failure of markets to reward public goods. The “prisoner of love” framework argues that the intrinsic caring motives of care workers allow employers to more easily get away with paying care workers less. Instead of seeing the emotional satisfactions of giving care as its own reward, the “commodification of emotion” framework focuses on emotional harm to workers when they have to sell services that use an intimate part of themselves. The “love and ...

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/29737725.pdf

Emerging Theories of Care Work

Prosocial behavior consists of behaviors regarded as beneficial to others, including helping, sharing, comforting, guiding, rescuing, and defending others. Although women and men are similar in engaging in extensive prosocial behavior, they are different in their emphasis on particular classes of these behaviors. The specialty of women is prosocial behaviors that are more communal and relational, and that of men is behaviors that are more agentic and collectively oriented as well as strength intensive. These sex differences, which appear in research in various settings, match widely shared gender role beliefs. The origins of these beliefs lie in the division of labor, which reflects a biosocial interaction between male and female physical attributes and the social structure. The effects of gender roles on behavior are mediated by hormonal processes, social expectations, and individual dispositions.

The his and hers of prosocial behavior: An examination of the social psychology of gender.

The behavior of women and men varies greatly depending on situations, cultures, and historical periods. This flexibility emerges as men and women tailor their division of labor to local ecological and socioeconomic demands. The resulting division is supported by childhood socialization practices that, in interaction with sex differences in child temperament, help boys and girls to develop psychologies suited to their likely adult activities. Although responsive to local conditions, the division of labor is constrained by women's childbearing and nursing of infants and men's size and strength. Because these biological characteristics influence the efficient performance of many activities in society, they underlie central tendencies in the division of labor as well as its variability across situations, cultures, and history. Gender roles—that is, shared beliefs about the traits of women and men—track the division of labor because people infer these traits from their observations of the sexes’ behaviors. Social perceivers often essentialize these traits by regarding them as inherent in the biology or social experience of women and men. Gender role expectations, which tend to be consensual within cultures, influence behavior through proximal social psychological and biological processes, whereby (a) other people encourage gender-typical behavior and individuals conform to their own gender identities and (b) hormonal, reward, and cardiovascular mechanisms enable masculine and feminine behaviors.

/pdf/biosocial-construction-of-sex-differences-and-similarities-237udqwboo.pdf

Biosocial Construction of Sex Differences and Similarities in Behavior

How should “care” be defined and measured in ways that enhance our understanding of the impact of economic development on women? This paper addresses this question, suggesting several possible approaches to the development of indices that would measure gender differences in responsibility for the financial and temporal care of dependents.

https://www.amherst.edu/media/view/92075/original/measuring+care.pdf

Measuring Care: Gender, Empowerment, and the Care Economy

Wages of Virtue: The Relative Pay of Care Work (WP-02-07)

(1987). Family Strategy: A Dialogue. Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History: Vol. 20, No. 3, pp. 113-125.

Family Strategy: A Dialogue

When Does Gender Trump Money? Bargaining and Time in Household Work (WP-02-34)

Reforming the social family contract: Public support for child rearing in the United States

Gender and Economic Sociology (WP-03-14)

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