Gendered Shares of the Family Rush Hour in Fulltime Dual Earner Families. A Cross National Comparison
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Gendered Shares of the Family Rush Hour in Fulltime Dual Earner Families. A Cross National Comparison Lyn Craig1 · Theun Pieter van Tienoven2 Accepted: 6 September 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract There are recognised cross-national differences in the average amount and gender division of paid work and unpaid domestic work and care, but country differences between men and women in the timing and intensity of this daily workload remain under-investigated. Using couple-level time-use data from Australia, the UK, Finland, Korea and Spain (n = 1838), we probe cross-national differences in gendered time availability and constraint, focusing particularly on the early evening ‘family rush hour’. We identify daily time periods during which one partner in a fulltime dual-earner parent couple performs routine time-critical household labor and care, whilst the other partner is simultaneously at leisure. In all five countries fathers in dual fulltime earner couples are more likely than mothers to be at leisure whilst their partner does unpaid work, and this disparity occurs most in the early evening. Multivariate analyses reveal the unpaid work-leisure gap is widest in Korea and narrowest in the UK, confounding expectations that social democratic Finland would be most equitable in this measure. Keywords Time-use · Gender division of labour · Family rush hour · Gender and family
1 Introduction Dual-earner households with children must combine the demands of family life with those of paid work. It was expected that as more women entered the paid labour market, gender differences in shares of paid work and unpaid work would diminish (Bergmann 2005), but the increased labour market participation of women has not been matched by equivalent growth in men’s domestic work (Fisher, Egerton, Gershuny, and Robinson 2007; Sayer 2016). Women generally do a much larger share of unpaid work than their male partners, and men are more likely to arrange family life around paid work and women to arrange paid work around family life, even in dual earner families in which both partners work * Lyn Craig [email protected] Theun Pieter van Tienoven [email protected] 1
School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
2
Social Policy Research Centre, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW, Australia
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fulltime (Monna and Gauthier 2008). Being full time employed but also disproportionately responsible for unpaid work heightens subjective time stress (Craig and Brown 2017). A central reason for this is that both paid work and some housework and childcare tasks have temporal imperatives, not only in amount, but also in timing. Whilst seldom the direct focus of analysis, domestic scheduling matters because it has implications for men and women’s work prospects, leisure time, and subjective wellbeing (Shaw 2008). Workplaces have been described as ‘greedy institutions’ (Sullivan 2014) with the ‘ideal worker norm’ refl
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