Confucian Egalitarianism: The Family Practices of Chinese in Ireland

This study is about how a group of Chinese couples living in Ireland make sense of their gender division of labour. It is also about how immigrants negotiate and navigate different cultures related to gender roles, family work, and child upbringing. In this qualitative research, 20 Chinese immigrant couples participated in semi-structured interviews, in which husbands and wives were interviewed separately about their family practices and gender-role attitudes. All participants were the post-Mao generation coming from mainland China, having been living in Ireland for over 10 years with at least one school-aged child. The study is intended to show the mixed pattern of immigrants’ gender beliefs, the complex motives behind their household labour arrangement and the cognitive burden of their parenting work. The findings of the study are threefold. First, the sampled Chinese immigrant couples held mixed gender-role attitudes that cannot be understood as variants along a traditional to liberal spectrum, which I named “Confucian egalitarianism”. It was a gender strategy that helped the couples reconcile personal and relationship concerns with the realities of life. Second, most couples had egalitarian housework allocation but inegalitarian childcare practices as a result of interconnected forces at micro and macro levels. Their behaviour related to household tasks was complex involving a flexible combination of instrumental, value, customary and affective types of social action. Third, the study also identified a unique, non-physical dimension of family work carried out by Chinese immigrant parents to promote their children’s intellectual, emotional, and social development: education-related cognitive labour. It was often a mental load given Chinese immigrants’ disadvantaged socioeconomic situations and the acculturation gap between the first and second generations.