Thursday, October 09, 2014

What To Read On Gender 10/9/14: Online Harassment of Women, The Wifey State And Millennial Parenting Roles.


1.  This piece on online harassment of women by Catherine Bruni and Soraya Chemaly covers a lot of ground and focuses on what Facebook, Twitter and so on do about protecting their users or not protecting their users and why.  Though Bruni and Chemaly focus on women as the targets of harassment, their arguments would apply to any demographic group facing concerted campaigns of online violent threats.

2.  Rebecca Traister does an interesting reversal of the conservative argument that single women vote for the Democrats because they want a "hubby state."

3.  A new report on the millennial generation in the US makes for interesting reading, though I'm not sure that all the data quoted in it applies only to Millennials.  Still, this table is interesting(p.10):



Table 1
Average Number of Hours
Year
Fathers
Mothers
1965
2.5
10.2
1975
2.6
8.6
1985
2.6
8.4
1995
4.2
9.6
2000
6.8
12.6
2005
6.8
13.6
2010
7.3
13.5
2011
7.3
13.5
Source:AmericanTimeUse,PewResearch Center analysis, http://www.pewresearch.org/data- trend/society-and-demographics/parental- time-use/

It describes the average number of hours fathers and mothers spend on parenting.  Things have changed from the 1960s, though some changes can't be explained by greater equality in sex roles:

Ramey and Ramey (2010) show that these increases have been particularly pronounced among college-educated parents, with college-educated mothers increasing their childcare time since the mid-1990s by over 9 hours per week, while less educated mothers increased their childcare time by only over 4 hours per week.
The report doesn't tell us if similar differences apply to college-educated fathers when compared to less educated fathers.