Who Really Manages the Tap? New UCLA Study Finds Water Use in Los Angeles Homes Is Deeply — and Invisibly — Gendered
A new study from UCLA’s Center for the Study of Women|Barbra Streisand Center (CSW) argues that one of the most basic resources in American life, household water, is shaped by gender in ways that policymakers, water agencies, and even households themselves consistently fail to see.
The article, “Gender and residential water use in Los Angeles: Ingrained, untapped, and porous,” was authored by anthropologist Jessica R. Cattelino along with Kelsey Kim, Michael Kim, and collaborators, and appears in Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, published by Sage. It is the latest output of CSW|Streisand Center’s Gender and Water research stream, and it draws on several years of fieldwork across four Los Angeles neighborhoods to make a case that has largely gone unmade in wealthy nations: that gender doesn’t just influence how water is used at home — household water practices help produce gender itself.
An Overlooked Question in a Water-Stressed City
Researchers have long understood that gender shapes water access in the Global South, where women and girls often carry the physical burden of fetching water for their families. But the research team’s central observation is that this same lens has rarely been applied to cities like Los Angeles, where water arrives, seemingly effortlessly, through the tap. That gap in attention, the authors argue, isn’t just an oversight — it reflects an assumption that once water is piped into a home, the state and infrastructure have neutralized inequality, including gender inequality.
To test that assumption, the research team recruited 36 households across Beverly Hills, Koreatown, MacArthur Park/Westlake, and Inglewood, neighborhoods chosen specifically to vary by race, class, and immigration history. Fieldwork combined semi-structured interviews, home visits, and self-reported “water diaries” that participants kept over several days, with an initial wave of research conducted near the end of California’s severe 2012–2016 drought and a follow-up round added in 2021 to capture how COVID-19 lockdowns reshaped household water routines.
The Central Contradiction
What the team found was a striking mismatch between what households believe and what they actually do. Across nearly all 36 households, women carried disproportionate responsibility for water-related labor — cooking, laundry, cleaning bathrooms, monitoring children’s hygiene, and the ongoing mental work of remembering what needs to get done. Yet when researchers asked participants directly whether gender shaped their water use, the near-universal answer was no. Of the 36 households studied, only one openly named gender as a factor in how water labor was divided.
The researchers describe watching this contradiction surface in real time during interviews, as participants who insisted their household was equitable would, moments later, describe an arrangement that was anything but — chores that were supposedly split evenly turning out, on closer accounting, to be far more lopsided. In several cases, women appeared to minimize their own labor by emphasizing their partners’ work outside the home, even when both partners worked. They frame this pattern as connecting to broader research, showing that when institutions and policies treat gender as already resolved. “Gender-evasive” framing can quietly deepen the inequalities it claims not to see.
Immigrant Households as an “Untapped” Source of Expertise
Another major finding pushes back against how water agencies typically talk about immigrant communities. Water utilities and public health researchers have often framed immigrant households’ wariness of tap water as a “cultural barrier”, a deficit rooted in unfamiliarity or distrust carried over from their countries of origin. Cattelino and her co-authors argue this framing gets it backward. Roughly half of the households studied were immigrant households, representing origins including South Korea, Mexico, Iran, Ecuador, El Salvador, Colombia, China, England, Sierra Leone, Argentina, and Guatemala. The researchers found these households often possess rich, hard-won conservation knowledge, frequently passed down by mothers and grandmothers who learned to manage scarce water under very different conditions.
Water quality problems in lower-income Los Angeles neighborhoods are real and documented, and the report situates individual households’ choices, including the widespread practice of buying water from neighborhood “water stores”, within a broader pattern of infrastructural neglect that disproportionately affects immigrant and minoritized communities.
The researchers found a “porousness” that mirrors, and reinforces, a much older division between a supposedly public, male-coded sphere and a supposedly private, female-coded one. When water regulators design conservation campaigns around an undifferentiated “residential user,” they inherit that same blind spot, and the resulting burden of compliance and monitoring tends to fall on women.
The full study, supported by UCLA’s Sustainable LA Grand Challenge and the Center for the Study of Women|Barbra Streisand Center, is available through Sage Journals.
