DOUBLE BURDEN

Double Burden is a term used to describe the situation of women who perform paid work outside the domestic sphere as well as homemaking and child-care work inside the home.

Since domestic work is private and outside the cash economy, it is not remunerated and this causes it to appear as something less than real work and as part of the natural gender role of women.

The Double Burden of what it's like to be black and female in America.

Double Burden: Black Women and Everyday Racism by Yanick St. Jean and Joe R. Feagin. The women interviewed in Double Burden share bitter, important home truths as well as personal triumphs. Their accounts of what it's like to be black and female in America just might open some tightly shut eyes. Although many whites wishfully conceive of slavery as an awful, but surely very distant, chapter in U.S. history, Yannick St. Jean and Joe R. Feagin show how powerfully its legacy has continued to play out in outright segregation and the insidious undercutting of negative characterizations. Fueled by a collective memory of brutality and frequent reminders that racism still thrives, the well-educated, middle-class women quoted in the book recall being given denigrating social messages about their beauty, self-worth, sexuality, intelligence, and drive. One woman says she keeps white men at work from "bothering" her by threatening legal action: "Now, what do you own besides that pickup truck and that big hat and those boots you got on?" she asks. "Because it's going to be mine if you keep fooling with me." Double Burden dips into a deep well of anger and suspicion, and though its message may be hard to bear, it lobs a necessarily explosive charge that blasts through the barriers built up by everyday, often unconscious acts of racism. --Francesca Coltrera --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title Double Burden: Black Women and Everyday Racism. Departing from conventional studies of black women, which characterize them as domineering matriarchs, prostitutes and welfare queens, this text uses the concept of a "collective memory" to show how black women cope with and interpret lives often pervaded with racial barriers not of their making.

‘The Double Burden’: Do Combinations of Career and Family Obligations Increase Sickness Absence among Women? - Espen Bratberg, Svenn-Åge Dahl and Alf Erling Risa 
Svenn-Åge Dahl, SNF – Institute for Research in Economics and Business Administration, Breiviksveien 40, N-5045 Bergen, Norway.
Women working full time in the labour market often face a second shift at home. We investigate whether this double burden increases sickness absence among Norwegian women. When selection is not accounted for in the analyses, increasing the number of children decreases sickness absence for a given labour-market career. However, women combining careers with children constitute a selected group less prone to absence. When sample selection is accounted for, increasing the number of children has an adverse impact on sickness absence. This finding provides some support for the double-burden hypothesis. - esr.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/18/2/233

Using the Service Economy to Relieve the Double Burden - Female Labor Force Participation and Service Purchases - R. S. OROPESA, Pennsylvania State University 
Using a national survey conducted in 1990, this article examines how wives' labor force participation affects the extent to which families use the market economy to provide goods and services that have traditionally been produced by women. The specific purchases examined are help with housecleaning, meals at restaurants, and meals delivered to the home. Findings are discussed within the context of hypotheses about the roles of household resources, personal resources, gender ideologies, role overload, and the specific benefits that different family members receive from the provision of each service. - jfi.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/14/3/438

Is There a Political Support for the Double Burden on Prolonged Activity? 
GEORGES CASAMATTA, HELMUTH CREMER, PIERRE PESTIEAU - Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR)
Abstract: In many countries, elderly workers are subject to a double distortion when they consider prolonging their activity: the payroll tax and a reduction in their pension rights. It is often argued that such a double burden would not be socially desirable. We consider a setting where it would be rejected by both a utilitarian and a Rawlsian social planner. Furthermore, each individual would also reject it as a citizen candidate. We show that the double burden may nevertheless be (second-best) Pareto efficient and can be supported by a particular structure of social weights biased towards the more productive workers. - papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=641203

Does Migration Empower Married Women? 
NATALIE CHEN, PAOLA CONCONI, CARLO PERRONI - February 2006
Abstract: Differences in gender-based labor market discrimination across countries imply that migration may affect husbands and wives differently. If migrant wives experience a relative improvement in their labor market position, bargaining theory suggests that they should experience comparatively larger gains. However, if renegotiation possibilities are limited by institutional mechanisms that achieve long-term commitment, the opposite may be true, particularly if women are specialized in household activities and the labor market allows more flexibility in their labor supply choices. Evidence from the German Socio-Economic Panel indeed shows that, as long as renegotiation opportunities are limited, comparatively better wages for migrant women lead them to bear the double burden of market and household work. - papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=881744

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