“He had to get used to it”: negotiating gender norms and domestic equality in urban Colombia

Despite a steep rise in female labour force participation since the 1980s, men’s participation in unpaid work in urban Colombia has been slow to change. The article examines everyday negotiations around resilient gender norms shaping the household division of unpaid work, showing that these are deep-rooted but not fixed. Mixed-methods evidence from Medellín highlights practices of coping, resistance, and contestation by household members as they adapt to rapid urbanisation, violence, economic liberalisation, and the Covid pandemic. These three tactics contribute to conflicting patterns of change: while the first two occur within normative boundaries, the last actively pushes boundaries in socially legible ways, reclaiming old values to legitimise new practices. These intimate expressions of power at the urban margins drive gradual yet incomplete change. By demonstrating how evolving socio-economic conditions create room for intimate activism, the article calls for development approaches that better attend to interactions between structural forces and ongoing normative change.