When Husbands and Wives Don’t Agree, Who ‘Wins’? Value/Practice Dissonance in the Division of Work Around Parenthood in Italy

During the transition to parenthood, the gender allocation of time and commitment between work and family undergoes a profound re-definition in response to both attittudes and available resources. These attitudes may be concordant or discordant between the two partners of the couple; they may clash to a greater or lesser extent with perceived financial or labour-market constraints; they may or may not provoke explicit conflicts and negotiations. By combining quantitative and qualitative data, in this study we focus on couples with young children or in transition to first child and we explore what happens in the Italian case when partners have discordant views on gender divisions of paid and unpaid work. The findings show that the division of domestic and care work seems more resistant to change and more responsive to the husband's attitudes than the division of paid work, since this latter is mainly driven by the woman's education and attitudes. The findings also show that very few couples overtly disagree. If they do so, the main issue in dispute is the allocation of domestic work. Moreover, although women have a ‘leading’ role in voicing and proposing solutions, these consist more in hiring external help than in obtaining the husband’s greater participation. Compared to domestic work, the allocation of care seems to be a less disputed and more flexible issue: when women start negotiations on a more equal sharing, men are more willing to increase their participation. However, when a more equitable sharing is not attained, couples' narratives much more frequently cite constraints on the man (typically his work) than on the woman, and recount women's rather than men's re-definitions of preferences for the best of the family.