Household Division of Labour: Generation, Gender, Age, Birth Order and Sibling Composition

By S. Punch. 2001

145 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Many studies have examined the household division of labour from a gender perspective, but comparatively few have considered age and the intergenerational distribution of household work. Using empirical evidence from my ethnographic study of rural households in Bolivia, I argue that whilst adult household labour is highly determined by gender roles, children's unpaid household work often cuts across gender stereotypes and does not merely mirror the adult division of labour. Furthermore, this paper argues that it is not sufficient to include only an intergenerational and gender analysis of household divisions of labour but that other intragenerational issues also need to be considered. Drawing on both children's and adults' perspectives, this paper discusses the nature of generation-specific tasks not only by gender but also by age, birth order and sibling composition. Whilst the paper is based on a case study of a rural community in a low-income country, it highlights the importance of the sibling order which has frequently been overlooked or ignored in household divisions of labour throughout the world. The findings show that the allocation of household labour in rural Bolivia is worked out according to generation, age, gender, birth order and sibling composition.

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c54ff16e71c5de394bcda8031065e652ac9cda63

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

1. Martin Woodhead
2. E. Webbink
3. Ruth Payne
4. B. M. D. Jong
5. Jeroen Smits
6. Tatek Abebe

Citations in the corpus

• Hidden child labour : determinants of housework and family business work of children in 16 developing countries (2012, background): “Because workload and resources are divided among household members, later born children have the advantage that when they grow up most tasks are already divided among their older sisters and brothers (Edmonds, 2005; Punch, 2001).”
• ‘Extraordinary survivors’ or ‘ordinary lives’? Embracing ‘everyday agency’ in social interventions with child-headed households in Zambia (2012, background): “In CHHs, the frequent exposure, of sometimes very young children, to a range of adult responsibilities requires the early development of skills and competencies, demonstrating that these are not simply a product of biological age (Punch 2001).”
• Youth transitions and interdependent adult–child relations in rural Bolivia (2002, methodology): “The fieldwork included participant observation, classroom task-based methods and interviews with all members of a sample of eighteen households (see Punch, 2001b).”
• Psychosocial impacts of child work : a framework for research, monitoring, and intervention (2004, methodology): “Beliefs and practice are often strongly differentiated according to children’s gender as well as their age, with many activities almost exclusively the province of boys versus girls, and with a status hierarchy associated with specific occupations (e.g. Reynolds 1991; Nieuwenhuys 1994; Woodhead, 199”