The diverging gender inequality across households: The case of Palestinian-Arab families in Israel

Abstract

This article focuses on how the family’s position in the stratification system affects the division of housework and childcare in Palestinian-Arab society in Israel; a highly gendered society experiencing socioeconomic change. Recent studies carried out in economically developed countries have shown that the household position indicated by education, income, and employment, related to the way the household tasks are shared by the spouses. However, less is known about the phenomenon in the context of societies that maintain gendered norms regarding family roles while women improved their education and employment status. A multilogistic regression analysis for household tasks and logistic regression analysis for childcare were applied to data from Israeli Social Surveys to examine the effect of household strata in the social stratification system regarding the way Palestinian-Arab families in Israel manage their household’s demands. The main results show that upper-class households and couples with a higher education pose their gender roles as more egalitarian, which demonstrates selective gender equality. The gender boundaries in the sharing of caring tasks are less rigid by class in Palestinian-Arab families while they continued to be determined mainly by the couple’s relative education and attitudes toward gender roles.