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Across many cultural contexts, the majority of women conduct the majority of their household labor. This gendered distribution of labor is often unequal, and thus represents one of the most frequently experienced forms of daily inequality because it occurs within one’s own home. Young children are often passive observers of their family’s distribution of labor, and yet little is known about the developmental onset of their perceptions of it. By the preschool age, children also show strong normative feelings about both equal resource distribution and gender stereotypes. To investigate the developmental onset of children’s recognition of the (in)equality of household labor, we interviewed 3 to 10-y-old children in two distinct cultural contexts (US and China) and surveyed their caregivers about who does more household labor across a variety of tasks. Even at the youngest ages and in both cultural contexts, children’s reports largely matched their parents’, with both populations reporting that mothers do the majority of household labor. Both children and parents judged this to be generally fair, suggesting that children are observant of the gendered distribution of labor within their households, and show normalization of inequality from a young age. Our results point to preschool age as a critical developmental time period during which it is important to have parent-child discussions about structural constraints surrounding gender norms and household labor.
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This content will become publicly available on January 21, 2026
Current socio-environmental transitions and disadvantaged consumers
This essay broaches the topic of people who are fully consumers for their daily provisioning, yet are disadvantaged by being poor, non-white, immigrant, women, and so forth; and it asks how they are experiencing and acting on the supposed transitions that are taking place in response to global climate change. Such people will be impacted by powerful changes largely beyond their control, yet their situation is largely neglected, with exceptions, in the just transitions literature. The article lays out a series of considerations for studying and acting on these processes. It begins with a vision of consumption as extended reproduction, a demanding household labor process of daily provisioning and longer-term persistence or change, done with commoditized technologies and resource streams, mainly but not entirely by unpaid women. Technologies, resource flows, and labor processes, then, provide ways to think about stresses, risks, and responses by disadvantaged peoples.
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- PAR ID:
- 10646546
- Publisher / Repository:
- Journal of Political Ecology
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Journal of Political Ecology
- Volume:
- 32
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 1073-0451
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- Transition, consumption, inequality, poverty, race, gender
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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