Equality slowly making its way into the home: Husbands and wives challenge old notions about household roles
Canwest News Service
By: Misty Harris
August 26, 2008

Canadian women are still working their socks off in the home, but experts say men are right behind them with the laundry basket.

Family life researchers report the notion of "women's work" is losing traction as husbands and wives challenge the old rules about gender-based roles. A new national study shows 56 per cent of Canadian men are now assuming primary or partial responsibility for household grocery shopping. More fathers are doing diaper duty than ever before, other research shows, and the proportion of couples in which women are the primary breadwinners is now three in 10, up from just one in 10 in 1967 and two in 10 during most of the 1980s.

Although mothering continues to dominate cultural messages related to parenthood, the contemporary Canadian family is moving closer to a model in which gender doesn't define domestic destiny. "There was a period when we talked about men and women doing the same [things] as the basis for equality and I don't think it's ever as easy as that," says Kerry Daly, professor and chair of the University of Guelph's Family Relations department.

"What we're actually seeing now is a different kind of equality that comes out of complementarity and a more complex set of negotiations based on people's different circumstances."….

Really changing the feminine face of domesticity will require a "wider conception of what it means to care for children," says Andrea Doucet, a sociology professor at Carleton University.

"Previous studies on fathers were just looking at who was doing the cooking and the cleaning," says Doucet. "While those are important aspects of care and domestic work, it's much wider than that ... The care of children doesn't just happen in the home, it happens in the community."

A recent Statistics Canada report shows that of the 21 per cent of families with a stay-at-home parent, 12 per cent of those are men. In addition, more new fathers are choosing to take time off work after the birth of a child -- 55 per cent, up from 38 per cent in 2001.

The viewpoints on parental leave, however, remain very different between genders.

"Women feel guilty for going back to work, and men feel guilty if they take too much time off work," says Doucet. "It's going to take a few more generations for that to become more nuanced."

…"Men earn more per hour doing the same work as women do," says Judith Stadtman Tucker, a feminist and mother of two. "So it's an economic advantage to free up time for the higher-income partner to work."