Abstract

Conventional gender perspective claims that men are supposed to be brave enough to shoulder the responsibility of organizing and maintaining a family, where women are supposed to be gentle and diligent, each was given with different gender expectations. However, current occupational situation exhibits a frequent variation from the generally known gender stereotypes. More and more jobs were taken by genders that are not conventionally recognized by social tradition. For this concern, this study takes male baby-sitters as examples, investigating the lifestyle of men indulged in female jobs and involvement of baby-sitting and household work. Objects include 10 male baby-sitters and their spouses chosen from community baby-sitting system. Each case was interviewed in depth with relevant issues. The conclusions reached in this study include: a. the spouses of male baby-sitters are also professional baby-sitters, male baby-sitters have child-caring experiences before, they are relative old and are motivated by economic requests to do this job; b. the occupational barriers for male baby-sitters lie in conventional gender concepts and stereotypes of baby’s parents, which can be resolved by attitude adjustment of male baby-sitters themselves and getting a license; c. for baby-sitting and household jobs, male baby-sitters and their spouses follow conventional gender labor division, where female baby-sitters play the key role and the male baby-sitters assist; d. though male baby-sitters and their spouses all work at home but they share differently in baby-sitting and household work, where male baby-sitters do not differ a great deal in household work sharing comparing to families in general.