Rethinking how we measure gender divisions of paid and unpaid work: A case study of new immigrant families in Canada


Umay Kader, The University of British Columbia

How do we define, measure, and theorize gender divisions of paid and unpaid work? In the case of new immigrant families, are there particularities of transnational identities and cultures that need to be incorporated into how we research tasks and responsibilities for household work, care work, and family provisioning? This paper is rooted in a larger cross-national project that includes a national survey (with almost 5000 participants) and a qualitative research project (with 88 households and 155 participants) on gender divisions and relations between unpaid work and paid work in diverse families. Our paper draws on interviews with new immigrant families that we conducted using the Care/Work Portrait (Doucet and Klostermann, 2023), a visual participatory method for exploring how individuals and couples navigate and negotiate all the work that goes into running a household. Sixteen individuals from Nigeria, Mexico, Brazil, India, and Singapour participated in seven couple and two individual interviews. Our team-based data analysis used an adapted version of the Listening Guide approach to narrative analysis. Feminist care ethics, care economies, research on emotional and cognitive labour and responsibilities, and a rethinking of the field of gender divisions of labour with and through these theoretical perspectives (e.g., Doucet, 2023) form the theoretical foundation for this paper. In this paper, we make three arguments: (1) Housework and care work tasks and responsibilities are relational, contextual, and multiply enacted and experienced. Housework and care work are not fixed, mechanistic categories that remain unchanged across space, time, and cultures; individuals and couples from different cultures can experience and assign distinct practical and emotional meanings to particular tasks such as cooking, responding to children’s needs, and liaising with teachers to ensure children’s social and cultural adaptation and well-being. Thus, emotional and cognitive labour at home does not necessarily feel like a “burden.” (2) Dominant measurement tools for assessing gender equality in household divisions of labour can overlook the emotional, situational, and contextual complexities of new immigrant life and overestimate the importance of gender equality aims for families relative to the varied life challenges and changes they are facing. We advocate shifting from measuring gender equality as a 50-50 gender split or gender sameness as the optimal division of labour towards inquiring how new immigrant parents’ experiences of paid and unpaid work challenge and revise the scope and focus of this metric. (3) In contrast to the dominant measurement tools in most studies on gender divisions of domestic labour, we suggest alternative theorizations. Symmetry , for example, can strike a balance between differences and sameness, while social provisioning considers both unpaid and paid work as contextually different aspects of direct and indirect care. Overall, our paper highlights the unique lived realities of new immigrant families and the weaknesses of employing a one-size-fits-all approach and concepts derived from Euro-western contexts and epistemological traditions that emphasize singularity rather than plurality and multiplicity. We also emphasize the need to widen the field of gender divisions of labour so that it centers relationalities (of paid and unpaid work, relationalities within and between household care tasks and responsibilities), people’s individual and relational identities, care and justice, and complex cross-cultural transitions.

Non-presenting author: Andrea Doucet, Brock University

This paper will be presented at the following session: