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This article provides information about the conflict of role between men and women in a household:
Women were presumed to be beneficiaries of development as part of families and households targeted for development. It was pointed out by feminist researchers that women and men have different roles in the household and in society making for differential access to resources and power within households.
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Therefore, women’s needs for development cannot realistically be merged into those of others in the household. The disaggregation of the household/family on the basis of gender was, therefore, the first principle proposed for planning for development that was responsive to the distinct realities of men and women.
Carolene Moser found that development fell far short of people, especially, women’s needs due to certain widespread stereotypes among development planners about the structure of low income households, division of labour inside them and the power and control of resources within the household. More specifically, she found three faulty assumptions that emanated from a western perspective and that distorted development initiatives as they had no roots in developing world contexts. These are:
i. That the household consists of a nuclear family of husband, wife and two or three children;
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ii. That the household functions as a socioeconomic unit within which there is equal control over resources and power of decision-making between all adult members in matters influencing the household’s livelihood; and
iii. That within the household there is clear division of labour based on gender. The man of the family, as the breadwinner is primarily involved in productive work outside the home, while the woman as the housewife and homemaker takes overall responsibility for the reproductive and domestic work involved in the organisation of the household.
Firstly, the nuclear family with its naturalised division of labour is an idealised concept that distorts reality. It has also been pointed out that the household as a residential unit is distinct from families, the latter being a social unit that is based on ties of manage and kinship and that though often these correspond, yet an assumption of they being one and the same is bound to lead to misconceptions about the nature of developmental needs of the units targeted.
Moreover not only do households show heterogeneity in their structure and composition, it is also a fact that women occupy different positions in these structures. To treat the family, therefore, as a static unit without the socio-economic context and the contemporary pressures that make for constant restructuring of such units is bound to be problematic.
For instance, although it is normally assumed that the head of the household is a man, the situation is quite different in actuality with women-headed households showing an increase with desertion, death, male migration, situations of war, insecurity and disaster. Female dependency is constructed on a false assumption that men are the breadwinners and financial supporters of dependent women.
While this may be a feature of industrial societies in some cases, it is a restricted phenomenon and does not represent the low income households and their realities where women are very often the primary or the sole earners. In the Caribbean, large parts of Latin America, Central America and parts of Africa, female-headed households form a sizable proportion of the economically vulnerable, often falling below the poverty line.
Where the mother is the only adult income earner and there are several dependent children, poverty manifests itself in children dropping out of education, working and in making for an intergenerational transfer of poverty. Women balance multiple roles in the household and the assumption of their economic dependence on men can seriously impact policy against their interests.
There have been many instances when false assumptions of women’s role in the family resulted in their labour and participation in agriculture being discounted and they being excluded from developmental initiatives involving ownership of land, credit-extension and other services.
Similarly faulty assumptions about the household as a natural socio-economic unit presupposes first that a family provides equal control over familial resources to all it members and that adult house members share between them the power of household decision-making. The importance of intra-household dynamics in inequitable distribution of resources and in unequal exchanges of labour and its fruits is ignored and questions of power and control left unaddressed. Arguments about the economic rationality of household behaviour contradict the complex array of relationships and interactions within the household and treat the household as an individual decision maker.
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However, the treatment of household as the most relevant unit of utility maximisation removes the possibility of exploring and treating conditions of unequal exchanges and exploitation between family members. Empirical evidence exists that there are conflicts of interests between men and women as well as interdependence and that gender inequalities are often rationalised through bias in perception of individual contributions and interests of men and women. There are economic as well as cultural and ideological reasons that underlie such asymmetries in intra-household resource allocation.
However, it is commonly supposed that altruism governs family relations and individual family members subordinate individualism in pursuit of the common goal of the welfare of the family. Marriages specially are assumed to be cushioned with love and sacrifice from conflicts those dog other social institutions.
However, the belief that marriages and families mean a partnership between men and women that is shared on the basis of common objectives and where there is reciprocity in rights and obligations that make for a joint control and management of resources such that each has access to pooled resources according to his/her need belies reality.
First, the household may not necessarily be a collectivity of reciprocal interests. Even though sharing may be the dominant principle of household distribution, it does not mean that everyone has an equal access to resources. Gender is an important element in defining people’s access to resources especially scarce ones.
For example, women routinely get less to eat in poor households, and are socialised to bear hardships so that their men can get better care and resources. Maternal altruism is held to be a womanly virtue and in most homes it is the woman’s obligation to routinely sacrifice food, leisure, health and entertainment so that men can have a bigger share of these. Likewise women often do not have direct access to household assets and property and have any control over these solely by virtue of being wives or mothers of male relatives. In contrast men have direct access to property and cultural sanctions for independent decision-making.
Household distribution of labour and responsibilities also plays an important role in circumscribing equal opportunities of men and women in the market and this limitation on women’s ability to expand income generating activities pushes them back into a dependency status, vulnerable to violence and intra- household inequality.
It has also been pointed out that management and distribution of resources within the household takes place differently with men and women at the helm of affairs and this is linked to gender based responsibilities of the two sexes. Studies across the world show that women’s income is largely used to pay for day to day food, clothing and domestic goods and thus this household provisioning implies that a greater share of women’s income covers subsistence and nutrition needs of the family as compared to that of men.
It needs to be underlined that the assumption of the male head as a benevolent caretaker cannot be stretched too far and that the head cannot by himself represent household needs, therefore his welfare too cannot be taken to be a representative of the welfare of all household members. While it is true that in most cases cultural rules, ideology and practices make the intra household distribution appear natural and legitimate, yet inequalities continue to exist because men and women share the bias in perception of their actual contribution to the household.
Direct money earning by men is often perceived as a bigger contribution to the household entitling men to greater household resources than women whose time and energy spent on ensuring overall well-being of the family as well as in non-market activities that indirectly go to support the men’s enterprises in the market are discounted. Correct assessment of individual interests and well being for planning development interventions therefore need to base on a gendered understanding of the dynamics of intra household inequalities.