Kinwork revisited: The gendered work of keeping up with family through communication technology

Kinwork and new communication patterns and technologies

Di Leonardo’s notion of kinwork (1987) describes the everyday tasks to sustain family and kin intimacy and cohesion across households. Di Leonardo phrased the term to describe an aspect of unpaid, undervalued, and often invisible emotional labour that women traditionally do. Letters, telephone calls, and postcards are all types of communicative technology drawn on in kinwork, and today a wide variety of digital technology is part of that, such as text messages, private social media groups, video calls, and much more (Sadowski and Eklund, 2021). Communication technology is used for significant events such as digital participation in funeral practices (Enari and Rangiwai, 2021), to the micro-coordination of daily family life supported by mobile technology (Wajcman, 2007).

A critical shift that goes hand in hand with the increasing use of digital communication technologies for kinwork is the move from household-to-household to person-to-person communication, that is, from postcards and from households and landline phones, to individualized communication patterns and technologies. This shifting paradigm away from group-centred communication has been dubbed networked individualism (Wellman et al., 2003). It describes a shift from tightly knit communities, like households, to networked people who connect as individuals and not as groups or members of a group.

In other words, ‘in the world of networked individuals, it is the person who is the focus: not the family, not the work unit, not the neighbourhood, and not the social group’ (Rainie and Wellman, 2014: 6). Even though, as Rainie and Wellman (2014), as well as Castells (2002), have argued, this change started before the advent of the internet and is part of a general trend of individualization, processes of digitalization act as accelerators and fortify this trend for people’s social lives; shifting focus from densely knit families to dispersed personal networks.

Consequently, communicative practices are changing in concrete family life. In other words, in the past, families more often acted as one communicative unit; for example, sending out Holiday cards in the name of the family or relying on one spokesperson, traditionally the wife/mother, for keeping up with family and kin (Di Leonardo, 1987), today adults and young family members are carrying their own, personal communicative tool – the mobile phone – in their pocket and are increasingly responsible for their own family and kin relationships. Increasingly, the elderly are adopting digital communication technology, spurred on by younger family members (Siibak and Tamme, 2013).

Various communication technologies are used today for kinwork communication, but likely in a different way than older technology. While overlapping in use and intentions for use, communication technology tends to occupy a different communication niche (Ramirez et al., 2008). Against this backdrop of understanding communication technologies as a means to create and maintain cross-household family intimacy on the one hand and the individualizing social tendencies in communication on the other, and the history of kinwork as a feminine labour, it is imperative to investigate how the gendered nature of kinwork might be changing.

Gender, family, and technology

Recently research has studied the creative work involved in gendered day-to-day family life (Mikats et al., 2021), and this study further adds to this emergent strand of research by addressing the gap in previous work of gendered division of labour around doing kinwork with and through communication technologies, including contemporary ICTs. The work at hand starts from the standpoint of the social shaping of technology, specifically looking at the intertwined effect of technology, societal changes such as networked individualism, as well as norms concerning everyday behaviour. While technology matters for the material parts of our lives and how we live together, it is one force shaping behaviour among many.

While kinwork has been feminine-coded, much new technology is instead masculine-coded (Cockburn and Fûrst-Dilic, 1994). Yet, as ICTs have become domesticated (Arnold et al., 2006), a taken-for-granted part of household life, connotations and gender assumptions often change. Research on digital technology use increasingly shows convergent frequencies of use for men and women (Findahl, 2017) and in the United States, as an example, the frequency of email communication with family, spouses, and close friends is almost the same for men and women (Boneva and Kraut, 2008). However, other studies suggest that social media, such as Facebook, is used more by women to maintain close ties than men (Krasnova et al., 2017). ICTs, as modern technologies, can be seen as constituting reference points around which identity, gender, and intersubjectivity are articulated, constructed, negotiated, and contested (Arnold et al., 2006). In other words, technology as material objects can act as scaffolding for the doing of gender identity (Lally 2002).

ICTs are now used for kinwork, yet little is known about what this means for how kinwork is gendered and done in small everyday acts.

Christmas cards – old technology, old norms

Christmas cards, once such an essential part of Christmas in the Christian world, are a practice in steady decline. In the mid-90s, Swedes still sent 60 million Christmas cards a year; in 2017, it had dropped to 20.5 million; and in 2018, only 16.5 million Christmas cards were sent (PostNord, 2018; SVT, 2017). Although part of the decline might be due to people moving to digital formats for their Christmas cards, the massive decrease cannot be solely explained by this. Less than half of the households in the sample send physical Christmas cards each year. None send digital ones, although a few had tried it once or twice. In the oldest generation, in particular, among those over retirement age, it is often, although not always, considered a crucial part of kinwork for Christmas.

Woman.US.75: Yes, it is a very old tradition. You could say that I have sent Christmas cards my entire life, it started the first year I was married and then it has continued, it is a ritual that has been with me through all times.

As in the quote, Christmas cards are connected to marrying and starting your own family. They are a way to communicate outwards about who is family and show those you care about that they are on your mind. Digital Christmas cards are not accepted by the families in the study for these reasons. The digital format is not seen as personal enough to be able to convey the intended meaning as a sign of affection, and policing of these boundaries occurs, as in the following quote where a relative sent a digital card 1 year:

Woman.Countryside.77: [HUSBAND’S SISTER] sent a Christmas card on the computer

In the following interview with the husband’s sister in question (75 years old), she explains that while she has tried, she finds digital Christmas cards too impersonal.

However, among some elderly and in particular younger households, Christmas cards are a thing of the past. Woman.US.72: ‘I stopped sending Christmas cards, it was too much work’. Christmas cards are connected to unpaid labour; it takes time and cognitive effort to manage each year, and thus, some women choose not to send them. For the participants, Christmas cards fall clearly into the feminine domain and so it is women who do not send them, not men. During an interview with a city couple nearing their 70s, both still working in high management positions, the woman replies that she thinks about Christmas cards every year, but never gets around to it. It is clear that if they would send Christmas cards, she is the one who would do it, and indeed was the one who did it when they were younger. Instead, they send out a digital yearbook about what has happened to the family during the year. It is a tradition that she has upheld from her mother. The man adds that: ‘We would like to continue, or rather you’, showing how this work is hers.

Indeed, in all seven households who send them, Christmas cards are the women’s responsibility. Even in the couple which appears as the most gender equal in the sample. In this family of four, living in a big city, the parents are both well-educated with white-collar jobs. They are very aware of gendered labour and talk about how they make sure to split household and care work. They divided parental leave in exactly half with both their two daughters, and at the time of the interviews, the father is in the middle of his parental leave while the mother is working full time. However, even in this family, Christmas cards are the woman’s responsibility:

Interviewer: So is it anyone who makes sure that the Christmas cards get sent?

In his interview, he says that she is in charge of this and says that perhaps it should not be like that. While many other participants see it as the domain of women, as in the following quote. Here, the wife takes care of the one Christmas card they send, which goes to a friend of her husband:

Woman.Contryside.45: FEMALE FRIEND normally gets a card

As in the quote, Christmas cards represent a type of household-to-household communication. One person might do the practical work of sending a card, but as a kinwork practice, it is meant as a greeting from a group, a family.

For those who have given up on Christmas cards, it is clear that it is considered too labour-intensive. The result hints at a partial explanation of why fewer Christmas cards are sent. This communication technology is governed by older norms on what is feminine and masculine labour in the home. The norms surrounding unpaid labour are changing and in response, women are changing their behaviour; the consequence is that the practice is abandoned as there seems to be no uptake by men. Neither do the participants move this kinwork practice to new technological formats.

Phoning for birthdays – generational differences

Birthdays are significant ritual events constituting a key opportunity for doing kinwork. Who is to be congratulated, in what manner, and by whom is a concrete example of how the micropolitics of everyday family and kin life play out. Even in a time of de-ritualization, family rituals seem to live on, yet in new shapes and forms (Costa, 2013). In the study at hand, birthdays matter. They have to be marked and even constitute one of the key rituals around which extended family is maintained.

Interview: So tell me, how do you keep in contact with your family members?

Physical visits are key for close family and for even birthdays such as 30 or 50, or important ones such as 18, the age one enters into adulthood in Sweden. Still, phoning is the standard for all close kin ties. When the landline telephone was first introduced, it soon became a distinct feminine technology, belonging to the domestic sphere and iconic for female intimacy (Moyal, 1989). However, mobile phones have been shown to be more gender-neutral (Lemish and Cohen, 2005).

The more distant the kin, the more common text messages, and social media posts became for birthday greetings.

Woman.Countryside.25: I try to phone them [relatives], even if you write on Facebook or such it is not at ALL the same thing as phoning and showing that you care, because Facebook is pretty shallow.

Social media is seen as too shallow to use for birthday congratulations for close family, as in the quote above, and are in some of the interviews even described as an affront, an unacceptable form of greeting for birthdays between grandparents, parents, and grown children. Yet in the data, social media becomes increasingly accepted as kin relationships become more distant and intimacy less critical.

How family members use phones, mobile, or landlines for birthday greetings is marked by generational differences. In the older generations, women take care of the birthday congratulations:

Interviewer: So you phone on birthdays then?

As in the quote, in couples over 70, the woman is in charge of such kinwork, phoning family members, including his and her relatives. These participants accept that kinwork is a feminine task: part of the division of labour.

In the younger generations, this is different. Two trends are apparent; one is that neither men nor women see it as women’s responsibility to congratulate or contact the man’s parents or siblings for him, as in the quote below.

Woman.US. 44: You phone and say congratulations on their birthday and it is really only mum really, and I think HUSBAND sometimes phones and sometimes he emails congratulations. But I and my siblings all have our birthdays (...) within two weeks in the summer so we are together then, it is just mum [whom she phones].

As she says, she ‘thinks’ her husband phones his family on their birthdays. It is not her responsibility to ensure he does, and she does not do his kinwork for him. Below, a countryside mother in her early 30s explains that her husband phones his parents on their birthdays, ‘No but, then it is more that he phones and then we sing, and yeah it is him that takes care of the call’. The work of remembering birthdays and making sure people are congratulated is not seen as the woman’s task. In some sense, particularly for more distant family members, Facebook with its constant reminders on whose birthday it is today has taken over some of the work of remembering birthday dates.

The second trend is how phoning, not only for birthdays but generally, is done from and to mobile phones instead of landlines. The personal, individual nature of mobile phones impacts how communication is handled. As this man talking about phoning outside of birthdays explains:

Man.Countryside.57. Someone said that when you call people it is to your own children, you don’t call their partner or their [mobile phone] when you don’t have a landline. It has become a large difference really. SON has a partner but I would never call her. You don’t do that so then you talk less to her.

This quote spotlights one of the cores of networked individualism, a perceived change towards personal technology where everyone has their mobile phone. A change from the shared landline, which was more of a shared resource in the household, in some cases mostly answered and used by women. In the conversation the quote comes from, the man talks about how and when he phones his children. His children only have mobile phones, so he does not talk to their partners outside of birthdays. Calling the partners feels like too big a step, and the nature of mobile phones means losing a previous accidental conversation situation. This was an experience shared by men and women alike in the sample. Networked individualism means that each family member is the centre of their own communicative network, men as well as women. This, together with changing gender norms on unpaid labour in heterosexual relationships, changes how kinwork is being done.

Digital kinwork – new technology, new norms

Regarding kinwork through digital media, a complex pattern of technological affordances and gendered norms emerges. Both men and women do kinwork through digital means. For example, through family chat groups and picture sharing, or individual messaging between family members. Important for digital kinwork is how the tools are used: the laptop, tablet, or smartphone and associated accounts on social media platforms are all individual. While Christmas cards and landline phones are household properties, the smartphone is the ultimate personal effect; see the following quote:

Man.City.35: PARTNER decides over her computer and I make decisions for mine, it is just personal things like this, what’s personal. What do we have that's personal [asking himself]? Well maybe clothes and such, could it be like cufflinks and then it is the computer and phone and that’s pretty much it, the rest is shared, we eat on the same china and so on.

This quote together with the discussion above indicates that men in the younger generations of the sample engage with digital kinwork since women of these generations (in contrast to the older couples) do not do it for them due to changing gender norms, it is their own networks, not shared family ones and, the technology is their own instead of household properties.

Digital kinwork is structured around the daily connections between family members, whether from the immediate or extended family. In particular, keeping in touch with siblings, in other words, family members of the same generation that have similar technology habits is done through digital means. For contact with siblings, it is apparent in the data how, apart from the eldest generation, this is something men and women do individually.

Interviewer: You said something earlier about it becoming easier with social media?

For this man living in the United States, Facebook makes it easier to maintain everyday contact with his siblings living in Sweden, and in this case, led to an increase in physical meetings. The barrier to making contact, for this man, felt easier to overcome when contact is regular through social media.

In the quote below, a man in his early 20s talks about his contact with his brother.

Man.Countryside.25: We have a bit of direct contact if something happens…

He explains how his contact with his brother, while they do not have regular phone conversations, takes place via Facebook messenger. When pushed for an example of what they talk about, the man recounts their latest interaction, where he attempted to provide emotional support to his brother after he had fought with his girlfriend.

Men also take charge of their sibling relations vis-à-vis their female partners, making sure that they have some contact. In other words, taking responsibility not only for one’s kin relations but also that of other family members, and this is a point where the generational differences are put to their point. During a long conversation about sibling contact, this young woman briefly explains how her contact with her male partner’s sister takes place:

Woman.Countryside.25: It is he [male partner, who phones] sometimes he walks over [to me] and then I talk to her through the phone, saying hi and such.

This partner in the quote is the one who maintains his relationship with his sister at the same time as he acts as a mediator in his sister and his wife’s relationship. For the woman in this quote, this is seen as unproblematic, and she discusses it in the context of her relationship with her husband’s family. He thus engages in and takes responsibility for kinwork beyond himself. The pattern repeats itself among several of the younger couples. Taking charge over and planning phone calls, but letting other family members say hi in the background is something women have done and do as part of their kinwork. However, making decisions on who should talk to whom might have very different connotations due to men’s and women’s unequal access to power in society and in the family setting.

The most common example in the data of how men takes responsibility for the kinwork of others is how fathers of young children take part in their children’s communication with their parents and their partner’s parents.

Man.City.35: I will skype if PARTNER is away, then I can skype with her parents and the other way around. And mum keeps contact with PARTNER. We have had some work there because mum has tried, she contacts PARTNER because she thinks that she is in charge of things at home, in a similar way that she is in her home. So I have tried to cut in between there.

In this quote, the father on parental leave engages in kinwork by video calling together with the child, planning and setting up digital meetings with his own or the mother’s family. The quote also demonstrates how these norms of kinwork sometimes clash between different generations.

If Christmas cards represent the family outwards, sending digital pictures in family groups on social media fills some of the same functions. In contrast to Christmas cards, however, men in the sample also take part in this type of work, as exemplified below:

Man.City.35: In the family groups we share some pictures and such, that is the group that is used the most I think

In the quote from the family below, living in the United States, the woman is a homemaker. This couple represents a more traditional division of labour when it comes to keeping in contact with family and kin where she is responsible for this type of labour. In this particular case as well, the man has no social media. Facebook for him, he says, is something women engage in and thus of little relevance to himself.

Woman.US.43: It is almost the case that I have more contact with his [husband’s] cousins and such, through Facebook.

In this family, kinwork is still seen as something for women; thus, a technology like Facebook also becomes feminine, an opinion not shared by the rest of the sample. This highlights how gender norms come in and shape the meaning of technology, and thus uses. It simply does not seem to be a question of new technology used for kinwork. Rather, complex entanglements of gender norms, communication structures, and technology emerge from analysing contemporary kinwork practices.

It is important to stress that older generations are not more gender unequal across the board and vice versa. Gender relations when it comes to family are much more complex. For example, I met one retired couple where the woman is the obvious person in charge of kinwork. At the time of the interview, she had just gone through hip replacement surgery. As I help her sort out an update on her new smartphone, it starts to ring as friends check in to see how she is. The first call comes from a couple they know, and in this case, the husband is the one who phones and offers the couple’s joint support and empathy for her operation; he talks about his own hip replacement and hopes for her quick recovery. So even in this generation, men engage in emotional and social interaction; yet the data at hand cannot answer to what extent men’s and women’s care might differ. During the interview, the woman’s husband leaves the interview after a while as he is very uninterested in any form of technology or kinwork, leaving all that to his wife. He comes back asking if we want coffee and sets about making coffee, defrosting biscuits, and deciding that we should have the refreshments on the balcony, where he sets the table with an old-fashioned dainty china set. Once he is ready, he asks us to take a seat. Doing gender and care work in all of these instances is a fluid process where what can be considered masculine or feminine behaviour is both supported and contradicted in the small everyday acts of family life.