it is possible for a child sexed at birth as a boy to become a girl and then a woman:
Sarin’ampela are ‘men’ who ‘like women’ (tia ampela). ‘Liking women’ in this context is different from ‘looking for or wanting them’ (mila ampela), which is what other men do when looking for sexual partners; sarin’ampela ‘like’ women in the sense that they would prefer to be women. When they put this into practice, this results in the creation of an ‘image’: the ‘image’ of the woman they would like to be.
My informants described how one starts becoming a sarin’ampela from an early age. As young children, sarin’ampela prefer to spend time with girls rather than with boys, and learn to braid their friends’ hair, carry water on their head, search for head lice, and so on. As adults, their identity is defined most crucially by the fact that they perform ‘women’s jobs’ (asan’ampela) and adopt ‘women’s ways of doing things’ (fomban’ampela). (Astuti 1998: 49)
If children learn gender by doing more than by being explicitly instructed in what a girl and a boy should do, then the central modes of learning gender in most of the world are through play, work (in the broadest sense of the term, from ‘helping out’ to selling their labour outside of the family) and school (again, very broadly understood and including religious school, academic study and apprenticeships). Boys and girls very often do different types of work and play: boys herd cattle (Yusuff 2018) and shine shoes (Tanle 2018), and girls are more likely to be looking after their younger siblings and doing domestic chores (Grugel et al. 2020; Nascimento Moreira et al. 2017). Girls also tend to start work at younger ages than their brothers because what is considered ‘boys’ work’ often requires more strength and skill than young boys have (Lancy 2008: 244). In her ground-breaking ethnography of children’s work in Kerala, South India, Olga Nieuwenhuys (1994) describes how most of the work that girls do involves the care of their siblings and of the house. When girls help their mothers in weaving coir they do not describe it as work but as helping out. In contrast, when boys do exactly the same tasks they think of it as work and they expect to receive some payment for helping their mothers.
In many respects, then, girls’ work is not very different from women’s work. Like women’s work it is rarely recognized as work but is more thought of as care. In chapter 5 I discuss the ways that thinking of the work that girls typically do (especially chores and looking after siblings) as not really work distorts our understanding of what girls do with their time. For example, for the purpose of defining and reporting on the extent of child labour in relation to meeting the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the UN adopts the International Conference of Labour Statisticians (ICLS) resolution to include either economic activity alone or economic activity and/or household chores. The former is called the System of National Accounts (SNA) production boundary and the latter is called the general production boundary. For the former it must be reported as child labour if the child is engaged in economic activity ranging from at least 1 hour per week for 5 to 11 year olds to 14 hours per week for 12 to 14 year olds to more than 43 hours per week for 15 to 17 year olds. In this model no account is taken of household chores. In the second model the same hours of economic activity apply but for children aged 5 to 14 years it counts as child labour if they do more than 21 hours of unpaid household work per week. For children aged 15 to 17 household chores of any extent do not count as child labour (UN 2019). For this reason, perhaps, campaigns against child domestic work are usually framed within the scope of slavery, one of the ‘worst forms of child labour’ for which there is no age or time threshold. In any case, if a 15-year-old girl, say, spends most of her time at home doing chores this will not appear in the reporting of child labour. In fact, it will not appear in any official records of children’s activities.
Although all contemporary societies have a gendered division of labour this does not mean that only girls do ‘girls’ work’ or only boys do ‘boys’ work’. Mothers living in migrant workers’ hostels in South Africa feared for their boys’ safety because they could not find work to occupy them in the city and so their sons were left to their own devices. They did not worry about their daughters because even in the city there were still younger children to be looked after, food to be prepared and housework to be done. However, if there were no girls in the family to do this work, then a boy might be called on to do it instead. One of the researchers’ boy informants said: ‘I do not think there is a difference between boys’ duties and girls’ duties. I have a friend, Sabela, and he does all the things that girls do because his sister does not live here’ (Jones 1993: 123). In East African Childhood (Fox 1967), for example, Joseph Lijembe describes how in the 1940s, when he was himself 4 years old, he was given the role of ‘nursing’, that is feeding, toilet-training and playing with his baby sister. This role fell to him even though boys were not supposed to take care of their siblings because ‘there was no older sister in the family, and my mother had to go off to work in the shamba everyday’ (Fox 1967: 4).
Despite a kind of pragmatic reworking of roles when there are not enough girls to do ‘girls’ work’ or boys to do ‘boys’ work’, this does not mean that the idea that there is such a thing as girls’ work and boys’ work does not persist. Even when there is a general shift in law and policy towards gender equality, it seems that gendered expectations of work still hold. Hewitt and Wells (n.d.), for example, in their qualitative study of white working-class families in London, found that girls’ and boys’ expectations of their life course were highly gendered, with girls wanting to work in hairdressing or beauty salons until they had children, when they intended to leave work to look after their children as their mothers had done, and boys generally expected to work in the building trade or as motor mechanics. Linda McDowell’s research on white working-class school leavers also suggests a persistence of gendered expectations of work. She comments that her respondents held ‘depressingly traditional views about genderspecific skills and abilities’, going on to quote a respondent who says ‘I think there is more jobs mainly for boys really. There are mainly motor places and stuff like that and places where you have got to do heavy lifting and they’re for boys’, and another respondent who says ‘Industry and engineering, they don’t usually take girls on, do they? Most girls aren’t interested in that anyway, they usually go for office work or journalism or something like that’ (McDowell 2000: 409, 410; 2002; see also Nayak 2003).
Global circuits of care and gendered childhood
Family life is one of the most important sets of relationships within which children learn the significance of gender in all its dimensions from the psychological to the political and economic. For some children globalization has profoundly changed the structure of family life, through the expansion of global circuits of labour. These global circuits often depend on ‘regimes of labour intimacy’ (Chang and Ling 2000; Hochschild 2002) that involve women leaving their children in one country to do paid care for families in another country (see also chapter 10). In principle this shift in the organization of family life could lead to changes in the organization of gender roles: in what is expected of fathers and mothers and sons and daughters. One study that explicitly addressed the impact of women’s migration on gendered orders at home found that in fact gender roles often hardened and that care done by mothers shifted to grandmothers and aunts more often than to fathers (Parreñas 2005). Furthermore the care that mothers provide for children had to continue to be done ‘at a distance’. Although both mothers and fathers migrate,
mothers are not automatically assumed to migrate for the sake of the collective mobility of the family. Therefore, mothers must perform greater work to show their children that despite the distance they do really still care for the family. This burden raises the bar in the transnational family work of migrant mothers, who find themselves responsible for both the emotional and the material well-being of their children in the Philippines. (Parreñas 2005: 66)
Parreñas’s hypothesis that gender roles would
