As gender is contested and negotiated in a specific locale, gender expectations can and do change. home based jobs might be one of those settings in which what it means to "do gender" can be different from that in other settings. Although families are embedded in societies and reproduce culture more locally, families are also the settings in which people confront daily the notions each member has of what is proper behavior. Maybe male home based jobs are more likely to define what it means to be a man in ways that are different from those other male workers use. Conversely, female home-workers, given their relative isolation from other peers in a work environment, might be more traditional or conventional in gender terms than their employed women peers working elsewhere. Investigating which aspects of gender are causes of home based jobs and which are consequences will add to the literature. Said differently, investigation can illuminate whether the act of home based jobs creates important gender effects or whether discovered gender differences are a result of the actors involved. Perhaps women’s (or men’s) self-selected employment types and the outcomes are more a factor of characteristics of these people than of gender alone.

General themes of cultural expectations for women such as those regarding child care and other unpaid household production activities have seemed to assign these tasks to women, but many women also have reaped great satisfaction from performing these tasks. Classes for men on parenting and popular books are contributing to a societal change in the United States in which men are being held more responsible for equitable family approaches to unpaid household production. However, this is not true worldwide. Educational programs and public policy need to be developed with consideration of current cultural expectations and of future directions appropriate to each cultural context and home based jobs. The rewards of child care and propinquous production activities should be emphasized to give them acknowledged societal value when performed by women or by men.