Sociology researcher to examine women’s balancing act

With files from Susan Hickman

Andrea Doucet has spent the past decade examining house-husbands. These are the men who forgo, if only temporarily, climbing the career ladder, in favour of raising their children. She is now turning her attention to working mothers.

Doucet, professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, has been awarded the 2007 SSHRC Thérèse F. Casgrain Fellowship to further her research into the fine balance women navigate between work and family responsibilities. She cites Statistics Canada data which indicates that in a third of dual-income families, women are the primary earners with average annual salaries of $40,000 to $60,000.

“One way of looking at the scenario is that women’s career ambitions are not constrained by gender. Another way of looking at it is that the women are carrying the double burden of work and family-breadwinner and caregiver-while still earning much less than Canadian men who are primary breadwinners.”

Her current focus on women as primary breadwinners offers a counterpoint to her recent examination of men’s roles as primary caregivers. That research culminated in the publication of Do Men Mother? Fathering, Care & Domestic Responsibility (University of Toronto Press, 2006), which recently received the John Porter Book Prize from the Canadian Sociology Association.

“I have studied men’s lives to get a sense of whether and how they are taking on responsibility for children and what this means for our current understandings of men’s lives and masculinities. That work piqued my interest in knowing about how women, who have traditionally held the weight of domestic responsibilities, do when they are also responsible for breadwinning.”

During the next year, Doucet will undertake interviews with diverse groups of women across three generations and will seek to understand, theorize, and write about the everyday stories of women who are juggling two sets of parental responsibilities.

“I am interested in changing meanings of maternal responsibilities, what gets delegated and to whom, what women hold onto and what they let go, how and why this changes over time and between successive generations of women, and what community and policy supports have assisted or constrained women in taking up non-traditional life choices”.

She will also study public policies and community measures that encourage active fathering and review Canadian and international social policies that support maternal employment.

With the resulting data, Doucet will write a book about mothers as primary breadwinners. As these are issue of concern to academics, policy makers and the general public, Doucet is seeking to write in ways that can speak to these different audiences. She hopes that her work will highlight some of the challenges faced by women, as well as men, as they reconfigure issues of work and family and how these issues might be fruitfully addressed by Canadian policy-makers and in public discourses and debates.

The Casgrain fellowship was created in 1982 and is awarded every two years. The prize includes a $40,000 stipend, which will allow Doucet to focus on research and writing full-time for one year.