Book Nook: Creating Equality at Home

Creating Equality at Home: How 25 Couples Around the World Share Housework and Childcare is Francine M. Deutsch and Ruth A. Gaunt’s inspiring and compelling collection of true stories of how some families manage to “undo gender” and show that everyone benefits when households are truly equal.
Taking a fascinating tour through countries including Croatia, Australia, Turkey, Singapore, the United States and Brazil, Creating Equality at Home examines twenty-five different families that, despite their vast differences in culture, have one glaring similarity: they have all resisted the dominant the gender norms and stereotypes surrounding them.
Despite the fact that the gender gap has been decreasing as women’s roles in the workplace have changed dramatically, most women come home after a day at the office to a “second shift” at home. Even when women outearn their husbands, they still cook, clean and look after the children more than their husbands. Creating Equality at Home illustrates that it is possible to not only reduce the gender gaps, but make them disappear.

I had a chance to review this book. It was intriguing. The first part read a little bit like a scholarly treatise, with a review of research and summaries, and provided a good background. I really enjoyed the second part, with the profiles of families. It was interesting to see how different families make things work, and it led to a pretty good discussion with my husband and myself about our own division of labor (which, for the most part, I think is pretty fair). It's a great way to examine how your own roles are balanced in your household, and see if there are ways to divide up the work of raising a family differently.

About the Editors
Francine M. Deutsch, author of Halving It All: How Equally Shared Parenting Works (1999), is Emerita Professor of Psychology at Mount Holyoke College, USA. She has published extensively on issues of gender justice. She and her husband equally shared the care of their son. Ruth A. Gaunt, Associate Professor at the University of Lincoln, previously held a tenured senior lectureship at Bar Ilan University, Israel, and prestigious fellowships at both Harvard University, Massachusetts, and the University of Cambridge. Her published research focuses on the social psychology of gender and families. She and her husband have three children and share childcare equally.