Female-Breadwinner Families in Germany: New Gender Roles?

Abstract

Female breadwinning has recently gained in significance in Germany. This article examines the extent to which female breadwinning is linked to new gender roles, and the impacts the role reversal may have on families’ everyday lives. Qualitative interviews with female breadwinners living in Western Germany were conducted to explore families’ ways of doing gender and doing family as an interrelated process. The research examined, first, the female-breadwinner families’ division of employment and domestic labor and second, the relationship between individual gender self-concepts and factual income arrangements. Some examples of modernization of gender roles and arrangements in everyday life in female-breadwinner families were found, but traditional gender concepts and practices prevailed. The families achieved doing family results comparable to couples with other breadwinning arrangements, but this demanded extraordinary efforts. We reconstructed “practices of normalization,” which couples used to reassure themselves and others of their “normalness” despite their gender-atypical roles.