Suchergebnisse

Many young professionals seek egalitarian partnerships in which both partners work for pay and share unpaid housework and childcare. Yet working couples' realities often deviate from this ideal, with women trading off employment for family care. Will contemporary young adults repeat this pattern, or will they come closer to achieving equality in work and family? Equal Partners? seeks to explore this question. Drawing on six years of interviews with the partners in 21 different-gender couples, Jaclyn S. Wong documents how supportive workplaces, partners' steadfast gender-egalitarian attitudes, and partners' jointly coordinated actions all need to come together for couples to experience gender equality in work and family. This book offers a compelling study of the dynamics of couples who aspire to equality as they navigate the external pressures that come with life planning in ambitious partnerships

AbstractEntering a cohabiting union, getting married, and/or having children are all considered defining features of the transition to adulthood. Life course research has shown that contemporary youth are taking longer to achieve these traditional milestones and are showing increased variability in completing these transitions. To better theorize this heterogeneity, this article draws on theories of purposive action to conceptualize agency in family formation and suggests turning to critical scholarship to link family formation in emerging adulthood to broader patterns of social inequality. Carefully theorizing gender in the context of linked lives also enables an understanding of how coordinated family behaviors among heterosexual couples can produce variability within and across families and ultimately challenge or reproduce gender inequality. A conceptual framework for gendered projectivity and linked lives is proposed as an example of how to expand life course thinking.

Community-based research suggests that lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) older adults are more socially isolated than their heterosexual counterparts. However, little is known about how social networks in late adulthood differ between LGB and heterosexual people at the population level. Using data from the 2015–2016 National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project ( n = 3,929), the authors compare the size, frequency of contact, composition, diversity, and density of core discussion networks as well as family and friend support across sexual-orientation groups. The authors find that LGB people share a few network characteristics with their heterosexual counterparts, including network size, frequency of contact with network members, and proportion of nonspousal kin members in the network. However, their networks are less likely to include intimate partners, are more likely to include friends, and have lower diversity and density. LGB people also report lower family support but higher friend support than heterosexual people.