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Gender Inequality and Social Inequality: The Class Dimension of Division of Housework in Croatia

Gender asymmetry in the division of household labour is one of the most reliable proxies of gender equality. However, it is most often measured quantitatively (at country level), thus falling short of providing rich accounts of practices in localised settings. Likewise, the classed nature of the distribution of household practices is largely ignored in research and presents a particular challenge in the study of social contexts in which clear class self-identification is missing. This paper attempts to provide an empirically grounded account of the connection between gender inequality and social inequality in contemporary Croatia, a society which has undergone a major transformation of both gender and class relations in the post-socialist period. Drawing on 92 semi-structured interviews (sampled for socio-demographic heterogeneity) and a multi-step qualitative analysis, typologies of strategies in the division of housework were constructed. On the other hand, we utilised Bourdieusian multiple correspondence analysis, as well as a multidimensional model of class analysis for hybrid societies developed by Cvetičanin et al (2021), to quantitatively construct the social space of inequalities in Croatia. In the final step, we projected the empirically established types of household strategies of division of housework into regions of social space, enabling an understanding of their class dimension. Our mixed methods design is based on Bourdieu’s philosophy of research, and data were gathered within the Croatian Science Foundation-funded project “Relational gender identities in Croatia: Modernization and development perspectives” (GENMOD – HRZZ-IP-2016-06-6010).

division of housework, gender, class, mixed methods, Croatia

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