New Configurations of the Sexual Division of Labor

A woman doing less housework does not necessarily mean a man is doing more: another woman may have taken it on. Helena Hirata and Danièle Kergoat use this distinction to examine work–family balance in their 2007 article Novas configurações da divisão sexual do trabalho. Published in Brazil’s Cadernos de Pesquisa, the Portuguese text credits translator Fátima Murad. It synthesizes research and comparative examples rather than presenting a new national survey or a universal sequence of development.

The authors distinguish two organizing principles. Separation assigns some work to men and other work to women; hierarchy gives work classified as masculine greater value. Occupations, household arrangements and policies can change while the distance between groups persists in another form. Women entering a profession therefore does not settle what happens to pay, status, time or domestic responsibility.

Delegated work has not disappeared

The analysis of delegation concerns professional women able to purchase domestic and care services. Delegation may ease conflict within a couple and make an employer’s demands on a woman’s time easier to meet, without changing men’s domestic responsibilities. Moving conflict out of one household can reproduce the gendered arrangement through an employment relationship.

The women performing these services must also organize their own households. Drawing on transnational domestic-work studies, the article discusses migrant carers leaving children with grandmothers, sisters or other women. Divisions among differently situated women—by class, migration and racialization—intersect with the division between women and men. An employer’s solution can mean family separation and further care burdens for someone else. Recognizing that difference does not assign women collective blame; it traces where the costs of a solution travel.

This explains the authors’ suspicion of neutral language about reconciling work and family. A policy that implicitly leaves women responsible for reconciliation may improve some lives while continuing to make them individually manage the contradiction. The conclusion adds that even delegated tasks require management, which remains assigned to the woman delegating them. Completing a task and being responsible for ensuring that all tasks are completed are different levels of labor.

The discussion of Japan further challenges the idea of copying one model. Referring to 2003 fieldwork, the authors examine how childcare provision, employment and family policies, and norms of motherhood constrain full-time careers alongside parenting. These are not statements about every Japanese woman today, nor a test of women’s willingness to achieve balance. Institutionally available choices change what the same policy term can mean in different settings.

The article’s French intellectual history and selective comparisons must remain visible. Separation and hierarchy organize analysis; they do not replace research into particular workers, households and states. Nor does identifying continuity establish that a division cannot change. The question is where work is reorganized, who remains responsible, and whether improvement depends on another group’s insecurity.

Hirata’s later study of gender, class and race develops the co-formation of these relations. Parreñas’s paper on migrant Filipina domestic workers returns the delegation chain to workers’ lives. The French time-use study offers another comparison between professional equality and minutes of housework or parenting, while leaving questions about coordinating responsibility beyond recorded activities.