Thinking Gender: The Cognitive Dimensions of Household Labor

Abstract

Dissertation Advisors: Alexandra Killewald and Jocelyn Viterna Allison P. Daminger Thinking Gender: The Cognitive Dimensions of Household Labor Abstract Decades of sociological research demonstrates that women in different-sex couples perform the majority of housework and childcare, even when both partners are employed. Yet the definition of housework animating such research typically encompasses only the physical aspects of household labor, such as cooking meals. Before a meal is made, however, ingredients must be procured and a recipe palatable to all household members identified. Such cognitive activities are ubiquitous but have been largely overlooked in prior studies of household affairs, in part because traditional techniques for measuring the physical dimension of housework are less effective in the cognitive dimension. My dissertation advocates for a multi-dimensional view of household life that more accurately captures differences in men’s and women’s experiences and in turn deepens our understanding of how and why gender inequality persists in the 21st century. The dissertation draws on data from interviews with 136 men and women (representing 76 different-sex couples across the socioeconomic spectrum) to answer four key questions: What is cognitive labor? How is it gendered? How is that gendering established, and why does it persist despite its apparent conflict with egalitarian ideals? Finally, what enables a small number of couples to subvert normative cognitive labor patterns, and what costs do they face as a result of their nontraditional path? I inductively define cognitive labor as the work of anticipating household needs, identifying options for fulfilling these needs, deciding among them, and monitoring the results. Gender strongly predicts an individual’s cognitive labor load, an association that is consistent across class groups. Men are not absent from the cognitive dimension altogether, but their efforts are concentrated in its discrete, time-bound, and arguably more influential components, such as decision-making. Equality is considerably more common in couples’ physical than cognitive labor practices, suggesting the latter have been less affected by recent growth in support of gender egalitarianism at the societal level. Couples understand their cognitive labor practices as a manifestation of their underlying selves and thus as largely immutable. These perceptions appear to shape the decisions they make about work and family. Yet I show how the traits they describe are better understood as learned skills, which are activated differently across contexts depending on one’s gender. Finally, I find that in about one-fifth of the sample, the male partner does more cognitive labor or the couple shares such work roughly equally. These couples tend to have a nontraditional employment configuration (i.e., the female partner’s career equals or exceeds her husbands in earnings or hours) as well as flexible or atypically-gendered self-concepts. Across the dissertation, I argue for reconceptualizing the individual level of the gender structure, often termed “gendered selfhood,” as “thinking gender.” This concept is meant to draw attention to the ways self-concepts are socially patterned and evolve across the life course rather than innate or acquired in childhood. I define thinking gender as a primarily subconscious process of bringing our cognition into alignment with who we understand ourselves to be—and in turn with what we believe constitutes appropriately gendered patterns of attention, perception, and evaluation for someone in our unique social location. The theory of “doing gender,” to which this idea pays obvious homage, focuses primarily on interpersonal interaction, arguing that gender is a situational achievement rather than an underlying individual characteristic. Thinking gender, meanwhile, offers a way to take individual agency seriously without neglecting the social context in which that agency operates. In this way, it can serve as a bridge between ideas about gender as part of one’s “psychic self” (Meadow 2018) and as an emergent product of social interaction. I use the case of cognitive household labor to elaborate this theory of thinking gender because such work is largely experienced as internal even as it has interactional causes and consequences. These findings have important implications for the sociology of inequality, gender, and family. For instance, they suggest current estimates of gender gaps in household labor actually undercount women’s contributions, because such estimates primarily capture only the physical elements of this work. My dissertation also introduces strategies, such as decision diaries and outcome-focused questioning, that enable researchers to systematically study a previously undertheorized aspect of household life. Beyond the discipline of sociology, my dissertation expands our understanding of what gender inequality looks like in the twenty-first century and why it persists despite society’s increasing acceptance of egalitarian ideals. I show that lay theories regarding what men and women should do in the household context have broadened more than lay theories regarding how they should think, what they should notice, and what they should prioritize. Respondents understand these latter factors to be closely tied to their individual nature rather than manifestations of a broader gender system that patterns thought and sensibility as well as behavior. Cognitive labor equality is possible, as the handful of nontraditional couples in my sample demonstrate. Getting there, however, will require a collective rethinking of long-held beliefs about what is personal and what is social when it comes to men’s and women’s household roles.