Parental Responsibilities: Dilemmas of Measurement and Gender Equality

Over the past half-century, enormous changes have occurred in gendered divisions of housework and child care across many countries, with a growing consensus that there is a slow but steady pace of change in gendered divisions of time and tasks but one that is combined with a puzzling persistence of gender differences in parental caregiving responsibilities. Rooted in a 14-year qualitative and ethnographic research program that focuses mainly on breadwinning mothers and fathers who self-identify as stay-at-home or primary caregivers and guided by genealogical and relational sociological approaches, the author argues that the concept of parental responsibility requires greater attention and that its theorization and conceptualization have critical implications for if and how it can be measured, the methodological approaches that might be used to assess it, and the conceptual fit between parental responsibilities and gender equality.