How class shapes gender inequality at home : Three essays on the gender division of unpaid work in post-socialist contexts

Abstract

Recent growth in economic inequality and class divides across Western countries has been shown to significantly impact intra-family gender relations and inequalities. Although Eastern European countries have faced a comparable growth of economic inequalities and a complete re-drawing of class relations following the collapse of state socialism, the category of class has been conspicuously absent from the analysis of changing family and gender relations in that region. In this thesis, I address this gap by investigating whether and how class — in both a structural/material and a cultural sense — has shaped gender inequalities in the division of unpaid work in the context of post-socialist transformations. I conduct three studies using the 1994, 2002, and 2012 waves of the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) from Bulgaria, Czechia, Hungary, Poland, Russia, and Slovenia, as well as primary interview data I collected in Russia in 2017. In Study 1, I analyse how the gender division of domestic labour changed across different classes in 1994-2002 vs. 2002-2012 periods. In Study 2, I theorise and empirically demonstrate how an interactional- level mechanism of double accountability to sex and class categories — undergirded by the perception of gender contracts evolved in the post-socialist period as profoundly classed — shapes negotiations about, and performance of, domestic labour and childcare among Russian middle-class dual earner heterosexual couples. In Study 3, I explore changes in the Russian population’s views on the gender division of labour between 1994 and 2012, moving beyond the unidimensional traditional vs. egalitarian conceptualization of gender ideology. As the findings of these three studies demonstrate, the analytical category of class, while still not widely used, is essential for making sense of changes in the practices and ideologies of the gendered division of unpaid work in post-socialist contexts. This thesis is a call to bring class squarely into post-socialist family and gender sociology.