Shifting Gender Norms of Care in the Family Home in Aotearoa

Although gender roles have shifted significantly for women over the past 50 years, gender roles for men largely remain the same. In Aotearoa New Zealand, unpaid labour in the home of dual working different sex couples with children is highly gendered, with women shouldering primary responsibility for childcare and housework. This has left the family as a site of tension between paid and unpaid work. While there has been much work done to understand the interplay between gender, work and family, many interventions are pro-mother rather than pro-family and there is no consensus on what interventions or policies create gender equality in the home. Therefore, this research aims to examine how gender norms drive inequality in unpaid labour at home, and how they might be shifted for more equitable home lives. Nine different sex dual-working couples with their youngest child aged 3 or younger participated in surveys, interviews and workshops to share their experiences and beliefs about the division of childcare and housework. Findings show that gender norms drive the unequal division of unpaid labour and emphasise how systemic forces, such as government policy, enforce and maintain traditional gender norms. Utilising feminist design practices, two artefacts were created focusing on enhancing systemic support of plurality in the identities and experiences of parents beyond the traditional mother/father binary. This work also reflects on what feminist design looks like in practice and proposes four key matters essential to guiding feminist design practitioners. These contributions show promise in providing better identification of gender norms, highlighting where interventions are best focused for results, and provide recommendations for orientating feminist design in practice.