Masculinities and Care

In his insightful book Family Man, Fatherhood, Housework and Gender Equity, Scott Coltrane (1996: 152) outlines Human Capital Theory and Socio-Structural Theory as two overriding explanations for why men are less engaged in caring and household work than women. Coltrane notes that both perspectives present actors constrained in their choices by social and economic factors although they differ in so far as the former are accepting of the status quo and the latter are critical. He then outlines relative resources, gender ideology, and time availability as three prominent mid-range theories that further influence the division of household labour. And he finds that ‘relative resources, ideology, and time availability are all important to divisions of household labour’ (p. 176) and also notes there are other important variables such as how long couples wait to have children. Coltrane’s overall conclusion is that as well as taking into account constraining economic conditions he suggests that ‘doing household labour is doing gender’, that therefore ‘gender ideology matters’ in how social constructions of gender that ‘create narrow definitions of what it means to be a man or a woman’ lead to ‘differential rewards and limitations’ (ibid.: 175).