The intersections of work time and care time: nurses’ and builders’ family time economies

Abstract

In post-industrial societies labour market de-regulation, the growth of non-standard work schedules and shifting gender patterns in the paid labour market are re-shaping family care practices and work/family balance. In this article, the work/family arrangements and practices of nurses are compared with those of builders in Melbourne, Australia. The concept of family time economies is used to explore the intersections of work time and family time. Some change in traditional gender divisions of labour was evident in the nurses’ families but in the builders’ families more traditional gender specialization was displayed. The article contends that the organization of work time shapes the temporal structures of family life. Gendered patterns of employment in sex-segregated industries intersect with gendered family care practices in complicated and sometimes contradictory ways, but gendered differences at work and at home have a significant influence on how time for paid work and care is distributed between parents.

Keywords

construction gender division of labour nursing time use work/family balance

Introduction

There is a considerable debate about change in the gendered organization of work and care in families in post-industrial societies. This article engages in this debate by examining the organization of time for work and care in heterosexual families with dependent children with one of the parents working in construction or nursing in Melbourne, Australia. The findings are significant because they show how family capacities to re-organize care are affected by workplace practices. The gendered work environments of sex-segregated industries were found to have an impact on family care decisions. For nurses’ families, flexible workplace practices enabled some redistribution of gendered care time. In contrast, traditional workplace practices in the construction industry intensified traditional gendered patterns of care. Edwards and Wajcman (2005) say that work/family interfaces are always produced by ‘structure and human agency’. They encourage exploration of the connections between these two elements. This article explores how gendered specialization at work and at home intersect and shape the distribution of time and work/family balance.

Changing family time economies?

The temporal patterns of gendered work and care in contemporary heterosexual families in industrialized countries are contradictory and complicated. Accounts of change in gendered divisions of paid work and care vie with accounts emphasizing the resilience of more traditional patterns where women contribute considerably more unpaid care despite increased participation in the labour market (Craig and Powell, 2011; Kan et al., 2011; Sullivan, 2004). Women’s paid work, men’s limited unpaid contributions and the intensification of work are understood to have produced a pressing time deficit in family lives. ‘Time scarcity and lack of leisure time are at the centre of concern about contemporary family life’ (Edwards and Wajcman, 2005: 45). In this landscape, the interactions of workplace temporalities and family temporalities require on-going investigation.

Gendered social expectations and interlocking labour market pressures, policy settings and family priorities constrain family time and care (Lewis, 2009; Maher et al., 2008; Pocock, 2006). Men’s higher earnings translate into greater marital power and less domestic labour (Craig, 2006; Edwards and Wajcman, 2005; Hook, 2006; Sullivan, 2004). Change in the gendered distribution of work and care in families has been slow (Craig, 2006; Hook, 2006). Kan and colleagues (2011) argue that we are approximately half way in a 70–80-year process toward gender convergence in domestic work. With time use data from over 20 countries from the 1960s to the 2000s, they show both interactional and institutional barriers shape the distribution of housework in families (Kan et al., 2011), with gender roles and economic independence as central factors in the distribution of housework hours (Kan, 2008). Australia, the UK, the USA and Canada are part of the ‘non-interventionist liberal’ cluster of countries where the state provides a low level of welfare support and market mechanisms are used to promote social development (Kan et al., 2011). The ‘modified breadwinner’ model is dominant where most women are employed but are expected to fulfil the major domestic caring role (Kan et al., 2011).

Workplace organization and the temporal responses of families

As dual-earner families supply more hours to the labour market than ever before (Edwards and Wajcman, 2005) the impact of parents’ different occupations on caring labour in families has become a key concern. It has been suggested that occupation has a strong influence on the relational and material resources that women have within households (Sullivan, 2004) and how work/family interactions are managed (Crompton and Harris, 1998). Cha and Thébaud (2009) contend the structure of labour markets has a marked impact on men’s gender ideologies. Men in rigid labour markets where there are restrictions on hiring and firing enjoy more job stability that enhances men’s ability to be primary breadwinners. In contrast men in flexible labour markets with less stable work are more likely to experience non-traditional arrangements. Some forms of flexibility in feminized workplaces may reinforce strategies of sacrifice and career limitation for women (Crompton and Harris, 1998; Lindsay et al., 2009). The translation of gendered workplace experiences and temporalities into family life (Cha and Thébaud, 2009; Crompton and Harris, 1998; Wight et al., 2008 ) and consequent impacts on families’ organization of time for care (Jacobs and Gerson, 2004) require sustained investigation, particularly as non-standard work schedules increase (Hosking and Western, 2008; Presser, 2003; Wight et al., 2008).

Much available research on how occupation shapes family care focuses on the difficulties employed mothers face (Pocock, 2006). It is well documented that many women choose temporary and part-time work to maximize control over their paid work and prioritize their family care work (Craig and Powell, 2011; McKie et al., 2002; Maher et al., 2009, 2010). But workplace schedules and flexibility have created mixed impacts on family/work interfaces (Craig and Powell, 2011; Hosking and Western, 2008; Wight et al., 2008). Crompton and Harris (1998) argue that workplace structures do shape and influence work/family balance as female doctors and bankers developed quite different work/family biographies and patterns. Female doctors in their study adopted more traditional patterns at work and at home, despite greater potential for flexibility. Sullivan (2004) too argues that women and men in ‘modest middle class occupations such as social workers, teachers and health professionals (but not doctors!)’ (2004: 218) may be more able to negotiate egalitarian gender relations than others. Such mixed findings about how workplaces shape work/family balance reinforce the need for on-going research into intersections of workplaces and family schedules.

Clearly, ‘no work schedule, standard or otherwise, is completely family friendly: time at work reduces time at home’ (Wight et al., 2008: 268). Evidence suggests non-standard hours (between 7 p.m. and 7 a.m. or weekends) can expand the parental care of children in dual-earner families through ‘shift parenting’ (Barnes et al., 2006; Craig and Powell, 2011; Lindsay et al., 2009; Presser, 2003; Wight et al., 2008). Yet the outcomes for families are inconsistent and shaped by gender and national context (Barnes et al., 2006: 4; Wight et al., 2008). Craig and Powell’s (2011) analysis of the impact of atypical hours on time use by Australian couples provides an important context for the present study. Craig and Powell (2011) found non-standard work schedules have a gendered impact on time use. When mothers work atypical hours fathers spend more time doing routine childcare tasks, though the overall time they spend with their children is similar to other fathers. A much stronger effect emerges when fathers work atypical hours. Mothers do significantly more domestic labour and childcare than mothers whose partners work standard hours. These differences are partly explained by the dominance of part-time atypical hours for Australian women (Craig and Powell, 2011), but reinforces the importance of gendered patterns in work and family interfaces. The present qualitative study of nursing and building families illuminates how these differences are demonstrated in the time economies of differently positioned families.

Research focus

The concept of family time economies is utilized to describe the ‘consumption, trade and supply’ of finite time for care and for paid work within particular families as they intersect with occupational practices and temporalities. ‘Each family time economy is shaped by policy settings, gendered labour market opportunities, gendered ideologies of care, childcare structures and the public/social discourse around such policies’ (Maher et al., 2008). The impact of particular workplaces on the distribution of care time within families is a key element of family time economies and the focus of this investigation. Daily practices of care and negotiations of the work/family interface are shaped by occupational structures and expectations (Crompton and Harris, 1998; Hosking and Western, 2008; McKie et al., 2002).

Nursing and building are compared because these industries are highly sex-segregated. With the feminized industry of nursing, female workers have a long history of negotiating accommodation of their care time with work time. By contrast the masculinized construction industry has only recently acknowledged the family caring responsibilities of workers and few men are pursuing increased opportunities for care time. There is some alignment between the workforce and assumed workplace characteristics. The caring aspect of nursing aligns with stereotypical feminine attributes and the construction industry is understood as stereotypically masculine. This alignment creates additional insight into how gendered workplaces influence family time economies and working patterns. But nursing and building have important commonalities that create useful comparisons too; both are ‘on-site’ jobs where workers are required to leave the domestic space to work and both industries provide opportunities for permanent and temporary work contracts. Importantly working ‘atypical’ hours are a feature of both nursing (with shift work) and in construction (with weekend work) and there is growing concern about the impact of atypical hours on family life (Barnes et al., 2006; Wight et al., 2008).

Nurses’ work/care arrangements

Nursing is highly feminized employment (90% of nurses are female) and the ‘caring’ aspect of nursing labour intensifies the feminized nature of this occupation. Nursing employed women with children prior to the wider scale of entry into the paid labour market in the 1970s (ABS, 2005; Curtis et al., 2009) and has always been characterized by non-standard working schedules that allowed for some forms of work/family integration. For example, Brooks and MacDonald (2000) found that many night nurses in the UK saw themselves primarily as homemakers and primary carers with paid nursing work fitting around this role. Most of these nurses opted for night shift when their children were young to accommodate their return to work (Brooks and MacDonald, 2000; see also Garey, 1995). In recent decades, attention to family-friendly approaches has intensified due to nursing shortages (Dockery, 2004). In Australia, this labour market demand may be enhancing nurses’ opportunities for time autonomy and effective forms of family-friendly flexibility (Underhill, 2005). However, there is also evidence that nursing work has become increasingly difficult as labour has been significantly restructured with reductions in staffing, higher outcome targets and new forms of care responsibility and delivery (Curtis et al., 2009). Nursing is an occupation where gendered attributes and older patterns of employment intersect with new workplace demands and new debates about work/family integration.

Builders’ work/care arrangements

Building is a large, dynamic and increasingly volatile industry in Australia. Over 90 per cent of building workers are male (ABS, 2005) and the occupation has a tradition of long working hours and weekend work for all staff. Builders work on average 62 hours a week and office-based project staff work 56 hours a week (Lingard et al., 2007). Research suggests these long hours interfere with family life and produce other problems such as lowered physical and mental well-being, burnout, substance abuse and workplace health and safety risks (Lingard and Francis, 2004).

There is growing interest in enhancing work/life balance for construction workers in Australia. Some research has found hours can be reduced without negatively impacting on productivity, costs or timeframes. Yet the entrenched long-hours culture has been resistant to change and even modest work/life balance policies have not appealed to builders (Lingard et al., 2007). Proposing a five-day week is viewed as radical in this industry (Townsend et al., 2008) where ideologies of traditional ‘working’ masculinty are entrenched and work has become less secure (Paap, 2006). Jacqueline Watts’s (2007, 2009a, 2009b) research on female civil engineers in the UK reveals a strong culture of visibility, long hours and ‘presenteeism’ in construction where workers who tried to integrate work and family work were stigmatized (Watts, 2007, 2009a). ‘Working on site appeared to require regimented visibility criteria with all grades of worker knowing their place and having discrete but clear levels of coordination’ (Watts, 2009a: 523). Particular displays of ‘aggressive’ or ‘macho’ masculinity are encouraged on construction sites and women in construction suffer entrenched sexual harassment (Watts, 2007). The construction industry is ‘notionally modernizing but in reality is very resistant to change’ (Watts, 2009a: 526). These two industries offer valuable contrasting gendered workplaces from which to explore how work/family interfaces are shaped by gendered workplace characteristics.

Methods

The broad aim of this research was to explore how families managed and negotiated work and care in the context of rapidly changing workplace conditions and family relationships. Of particular interest was how family time economies were affected by working time and the effects on gendered distributions of care in the family, the focus in this article. Twenty in-depth, qualitative couple interviews were undertaken with nurses and their partners and 10 such interviews with builders and their partners in Melbourne, Australia. The uneven sample size reflected the difficulty of recruiting building families. The limited industry attention to work/family practices (Lingard and Francis, 2004; Lingard et al., 2007) may have meant work/family discussions seemed less relevant to potential participants. The study was approved by the Monash University Ethics Committee. The couples were heterosexual, with at least one partner working as a nurse or builder and at least one dependent child less than 12 years of age. Participants were recruited though industry organizations, workplace newsletters and flyers.

The interviews focused on paid labour (hours worked and flexibility available), domestic labour, transport of children and family priorities and time strategies. Given an interest in how work/family decisions were negotiated, semi-structured couple interviews were chosen so couples described the key impacts of work/family intersections in their own terms. Couple accounts reveal valuable material about domestic organization and management as how women and men talk about everyday events can reveal their levels of involvement and responsibility (Maher and Singleton, 2003; Singleton and Maher, 2004). Couple interviews can provide a ‘thicker’ description of constraints and possibilities available to families than do individual interviews: they gather and integrate information from both partners simultaneously. Valentine (1999) says joint interviews provide an opportunity to observe negotiation in practice as the couples describe and justify their decisions to the interviewer, and each other. It was found that women tended to dominate the interviews, perhaps illustrating their greater responsibility and involvement in managing work and care for families. The data reveal substantial agreement between couples about why family time was organized as it was, but contradictions and differing interpretations did emerge. These conflicts may be under-represented in the interviews, as it is probable couples with high levels of agreement were more likely to participate. The small number of couples is a limitation but close qualitative work offers an opportunity to draw out complexity and diversity.

The average age of the nurses in the sample was 43. The majority were female (N = 18). There were four male nurses in the sample (two who responded to the advertisement and a further two partnered with female nurses in the study). The remaining 16 had partners working in a wide range of industries: three engineers, three in business or finance, three educators/writers, one policeman and six tradesmen. The average age of the builders was 40. All of the builders were male and all were primary breadwinners (N = 10). Five had partners who stayed at home full-time and five had partners who worked part time (one teachers’ aide, one childcare worker, one fitness centre worker, one sports coach, one cleaner/cooking teacher).

The data generated from the interviews was coded and managed using the qualitative analysis software NVivo. Interviews were read a number of times and coded. Codes were developed into themes using a grounded theory approach that prioritizes participants’ articulation of their experiences (Strauss and Corbin, 1990). These themes were further refined as the analysis developed. This study is limited because of its small sample size and the constraints of the couple interviews. It does offer important insights, however, into how family time economies are affected by particular workplace characteristics and temporalities. It illuminates how gendered characteristics at work influence the distribution of family time and care.

Findings

Nurses’ work/care arrangements

The work and family time arrangements of the 20 nursing families were diverse and dynamic. The dominant model was the modified breadwinner/modified carer model (N = 11), but a substantial number had more radically egalitarian arrangements where both mothers and fathers were equally engaged in breadwinning (N = 7). There were two traditional male breadwinner/female carer couples where male nurses had stay at home wives (Lindsay et al., 2009).

The structured nature of nursing shift work means female nurses are unable to be present at some crucial times for care of children such as meal times, mornings or bed times. Paternal care was substituted by most of the families at these times and was seen as preferable to any other form of childcare. As Barnett and colleagues (2008) argue, maternal absence at key times leads to a ‘re-gendering’ of childcare and domestic labour tasks (2008: 417; see also Morehead, 2001). The fathers in these nurse families were spending substantial amounts of time alone caring for their children. They viewed themselves and were viewed by their partners as competent parents and important secondary carers for their children.

In the dual full-time breadwinner families, time for daily care and domestic labour was distributed in more egalitarian ways (N = 7). In four of the dual-earner families, the men had more flexible working hours than the women and undertook more childcare than their partners. Two of these men were tradesmen (not working in construction), one was a teacher and the other was a nurse himself. The following sections present data from three nursing families to illustrate the diverse family time economies that emerged. Workplace flexibility was an important resource in the management of family time in the nurses’ families: part-time, casual, weekend and night shifts were used by many women to facilitate family care that was shared between mothers and fathers.

Flexible families working and caring: three nurses’ families

Helen and Brian: ‘We’re completely interchangeable’

Helen (49) and Brian (50) were both nurses and had two teenage children. They articulated egalitarian gender arrangements and saw childcare as an equally shared responsibility – ‘our role’. Over the years they had both taken turns working part-time and full-time and stated, ‘Our domestic skills are pretty interchangeable.’ Brian discussed new forms of workplace flexibility (self-rostering and moving between part-time and full-time work) as facilitating care and avoiding negative relationship impacts of diminished family time. The flexibility of casual nursing and easy availability of shifts through agency work created flexible work/care arrangements and contributed to the movement of care work between them.

I didn’t like my job so I said I would stop doing my job and I would stay at home so that Helen could work more. And nursing definitely facilitated that because when we needed extra income … I could just ring up and I could work straight away …. We’ve been able to have somebody here before and after normal working hours – well, to fit around school. So we have engineered it quite well. (Brian)

They recognized that their egalitarian work/care arrangements were unusual and remarked that Brian’s paediatric training had had a positive impact. His professional ability to care for babies and children had shaped their family time economy and facilitated redistribution of traditionally gendered caring time at home.

We were completely interchangeable. I think we’re a bit uncharacteristic in that way in that Brian cooks and cleans and does all the kid-related stuff as much as – probably more than I do. So in terms of distribution of labour, it’s pretty – it ebbs and flows. Whoever was working more out of the home did less in the home. (Helen)

As Brian described later in the interview, workplace organization had had a positive impact on their family life: ‘Nursing has meant we’ve had the flexibility to have a very happy and productive family life.’ Overall, this family had been able to equitably share caring and paid labour because both parents were in a flexible labour market facilitating easy moves in and out of work (Cha and Thébaud, 2009). As a male nurse, Brian valued caring labour and had gained much experience caring for his children while his wife was at work. Helen was comfortable in giving over domestic caring labour to Brian. In this couple interview, both felt high labour market demand for nurses and high labour market flexibility and the similar earnings available to both partners had created a valued opportunity to re-negotiate the distribution of work/care and make the partners ‘interchangeable’.

Martha and Kevin: ‘It was more beneficial for her to work and me to step back’

Martha (40) and Kevin (43) had two children aged nine and 12 and had enacted what they described as a ‘role reversal’. Martha had postgraduate qualifications in theatre nursing and worked full-time as a clinical coordinator across five sites. Kevin worked school hours as an automotive spray-painter and reduced his hours when Martha was promoted, meaning longer work hours for her. They shared domestic tasks. The morning routine was shared and Kevin did school pick up.

I work from 9.30 till approximately two o’clock, 2.30, finish work then make my way to school. Pick the kids up from school on a Monday at about, they finish school at quarter past three then I bring them home. Then my day really gets going. (Kevin)

Kevin played an active role in caring for the children, organizing their activities and play dates and doing domestic labour inside and outside the house. He was very involved with the children’s school and attended assembly and school excursions when he could. Prior to Martha’s promotion, Kevin worked full-time and Martha worked an early shift two days a week. The family found this more difficult to manage and the children would also have to get up early and attend before-school care and holiday care.

Kevin:

That’s why we had a role reversal. Because Martha would have the opportunity to do this job and obviously the, we sort of worked the sums out that it was more beneficial for her to do that and for me to take a step back and spend [time with the children].

Martha:

Well it’s also too, it’s more for my career development as well.

Kevin:

Yeah. And it was easier on the kids if I gave up full-time work and concentrated on them initially and then me secondary.

Martha was clearly committed to her work and could see further career development opportunities. She did express regret at not caring more extensively for her children: ‘Sometimes I feel I miss out.’ In this family a ‘role reversal’ where Martha became the major breadwinner appears to depend on a number of variables. Martha’s promotion meant she was earning more than her husband but had less flexibility in terms of hours. New working arrangements where Martha took the new job and Kevin maintained his hours were trialled but resulted in more stress and more use of formal childcare than the couple wanted. Kevin could not achieve more flexibility as an employee in the male-dominated spray-painting business, so he eventually negotiated shorter working hours by quitting his job and beginning as a private contractor. These on-going reorganizations of work and care pointed to the dynamism in family time economies in relation to workplace demands and characteristics.

Cheryl and David: ‘It’s hard work basically, a working family’

Despite the egalitarian examples discussed above, a modified breadwinner/homemaker gender model was the most common among the nurses (N = 11) (Lindsay et al., 2009). Cheryl, a nurse (47) and David, a technical writer (55) exemplified this pattern. They had two boys aged eight and 10. David was the primary breadwinner and the family income was supplemented by Cheryl’s part-time nursing work. Cheryl had prioritized care of her sons and their many sporting activities over paid work. Formal childcare had been used in the past but the couple now preferred parental care. Cheryl, in common with many of the female nurses in this study, chose nursing agency work because of the flexibility offered. She could choose her hours and did not work during school holidays or if one of her children was sick: ‘I phone up at the beginning of the week and just say which days I’m able to work.’

Although Cheryl did most of the childcare and domestic labour, David got the children to school when she worked an early shift two days a week. David had always worked full-time and Cheryl had tried taking on different types of shifts, seeking to find a workplace pattern that meshed best with their family care needs. When the children were young, she worked at weekends but David found weekend caring ‘impossible’ and very tiring after a week of full-time work. For Cheryl, ‘family life comes first’ and she was happy for her paid work to play a secondary role. In this family a similar ‘trial and error’ process in negotiating work/care arrangements is seen to that in Martha and Kevin’s family. But a more traditional gender ideology had shaped the outcome as David’s reluctance to reduce working hours or do significant solo family care had shaped Cheryl’s paid work options (Lewis, 2009). Ostensibly both partners had substantial labour market flexibility but Cheryl’s high value on family caring labour and David’s commitment to breadwinning produced a relatively traditional arrangement.

The nurses’ work/family arrangements discussed in this section illustrate on-going domestic negotiation, the trial of different work/care arrangements and diverse outcomes. These family time economies were shaped by opportunities for flexible paid labour, women’s relative earnings and men’s willingness to care for their children. Neither workplaces nor gendered care ideologies determined outcomes, as interactions between work and home were negotiated in different ways within different families. But the flexibility of nursing work did create movement and change in the distribution of caring time. The next section examines building families and shows how very different workplace characteristics influenced family time and care.

Builders’ work/care arrangements

The 10 builders’ families offer a stark contrast as most adhered to more traditional gendered work/care patterns. All of the builders in the sample were male, all worked full-time hours (often with substantial overtime) and all were primary breadwinners (N = 10). Half of the builders (N = 5) had partners who stayed at home full-time following the traditional male breadwinner/female carer model. The men spent long hours working and time away from home was often increased by long travel times to building sites; 12-hour days away from home were usual. Most also worked a shorter shift on Saturday and/or Sunday. Only two of the builders did not routinely work at the weekend. Consequently most of the men spent very little time with their young children during the week.

In five of the families, care arrangements had been modified slightly – the women had become secondary breadwinners in addition to their caring work. But in contrast to the nurses’ families, fathers did not assume substantial secondary caring roles. Maternal care was replaced by informal care on the part of grandmothers, neighbours or older siblings when mothers undertook paid work. Only three of the builders undertook any regular childcare tasks such as showering/bathing their children, giving them breakfast or putting children to bed. In all cases the mothers (or grandmothers) were present in the home.

Therefore the dominant work/care arrangement for the builders’ families was the largely unmodified traditional breadwinner/homemaker division of labour with high value on men’s economic provision and women’s caring labour. Men’s lack of participation in domestic labour and childcare was mostly accepted though many of the women and some of the men themselves wanted more paternal time with children. The men frequently reported lack of choice in the location and hours of their work. Many of the couples felt that work/care arrangements in the broader society had changed but not for them. Indeed half of the couples (N = 5) explicitly discussed their work care arrangements as ‘old-fashioned’, ‘very traditional’ or ‘old-school’. Only one building family used formal childcare. The following section explores the family time economies of three builders’ families. It looks at how the non-standard and lengthy workplace time demands influenced the maintenance of traditional work/care arrangements at home.

Inflexible traditional gender roles: three builders’ families

Frank and Maria: seven children and ‘he is the king of the castle’

Frank (age 48) and Maria (age 45) had highly traditional gender arrangements and both were extremely happy with this. Frank worked long hours as a foreman for a large construction company and Maria worked long hours at home caring for their seven children (aged six to 22). Four of the children were currently living at home. Frank had worked in the building industry for over 30 years and usually worked six days a week at the time of the study. He left home before 6 a.m. and got home after work at 7–7.30 p.m. with a shorter shift on Saturday. Until a decade earlier he would have routinely worked seven days a week and he accepted that ‘it becomes part of your life and that’s the routine you follow’. This couple saw gender specialization as key to their success: ‘She’s got her role, she raises the kids and I’ve got my role, that’s the relationship that we have.’

Frank and Maria recognized that their gender arrangements were traditional and that younger people ‘have different priorities’. Maria acknowledged that ‘the children don’t see much of their father’ but she saw him as the ‘perfect family man’ because of his consistent breadwinning.

We joke … ‘he’s the king of the castle’, and when he comes home you’ve got to look after him because he brings everything. Everything we enjoy is because of what he does for us and that’s something that I have said to the children. They are raised knowing this is why Daddy’s not here. More so with the first five [children] you would have a father’s day event and there would be fathers there but Frank would never come. And they would be questioning ‘But why? These fathers can make it.’ ‘Well maybe those fathers don’t work but your father has to work. See those shoes you’re wearing, he made the money for me to buy those shoes for you.’ And this is what I raise my children [with]; he’s the leader of the family …. To me he’s like the perfect family man. (Maria)

In no other couple were care practices so starkly divided. Frank had responded to a demanding and rigid labour market by making himself fully available and focusing on the breadwinning contribution to the family. Maria had been happy to prioritize family care and her substantial child bearing and child rearing responsibilities had offered no time for her to engage in paid work. This traditional gender division of caring labour had however required on-going justification to the children in this family. They wanted more contact with their absent father and envied the presence of other children’s fathers.

Tim and Sally: ‘We are a pretty normal family, just incredibly busy’

Tim (45) and Sally (43) had three children aged 15, eight and six and their work/care arrangements had changed substantially over time. They had quite traditional gender arrangements currently but for three years Sally had also worked six days a week running a café that they owned. At the moment Tim was the primary breadwinner and Sally did some part-time work cleaning houses for elderly people and running cooking classes at a community centre. In addition, Sally coordinated children’s sports activities and the walking bus (a volunteer programme walking children to school).

Tim worked 56 hours a week on average and got up at 5.30 a.m. to beat the traffic. Tim found that ‘you have to work a lot of hours to survive, the bills never stop’ – but he did not support Sally working more hours to supplement their income: ‘I only want Sally to work part-time.’ Sally had recently done a week of full-time work but found this ‘incredibly stressful’ for her and for the whole family. Among their friends, they noted it was the norm for women to engage in paid work. They did have different views about the value of the ‘stay at home wife’ role. For Tim it symbolized a relaxed and prosperous lifestyle but for Sally it symbolized boredom and futility. ‘Doing nothing except your housework, that’s so boring …. You know, there’s only so many cups of coffee you can drink in a day.’

Sally had worked longer hours in the past and the family used paid childcare but this created family stresses. Currently, Sally had sacrificed her career ambitions as Tim’s unwillingness to be a hands-on father was constraining Sally’s labour market choices. Here, the family time economy had seen some change, but a traditional gendered distribution of caring labour had reasserted itself despite Sally’s dissatisfactions, as Tim’s work hours and patterns had dominated arrangements.

Craig and Mandy: ‘Let’s just sell this house and have a life?’

Craig (36) and Mandy (33) felt somewhat stuck with their current work/care arrangements for financial reasons. This couple had married young and had four boys aged five to 14. Craig was a foreman in a large company (supervising 250 staff) and worked long hours, usually from 5.50 a.m. till 6.30 p.m. at night and most Saturdays. They had a large house on half an acre of land in the outer suburbs of Melbourne. Mandy worked three morning shifts a week at a local gym and her mother came over early to get the kids off to school on those days. Prior to this she had ‘stayed at home for seven years’. Craig’s work paid well and had enabled them to buy a large house but came at what was seen as a high cost for his family because he was absent from home most of the time and was frequently tired.

My sort of role during the week is basically to put the kids to bed, that’s about the only time that I spend with them during the week, which gets a bit hard at times. Especially when … little Sam says ‘Are you home tomorrow dad?’ ‘No.’ ‘Oh.’ And he’s always saying that, you know? (Craig)

Both enjoyed their house and land but also realized that they had trapped themselves into difficult work/life arrangements where Craig needed to work long hours to sustain their lifestyle. As Mandy said, ‘There’s been many times when we’ve actually considered selling this house so that he doesn’t have to be at that job.’ But it seemed likely that they would continue living largely separate gender-specialized lives where Craig worked hard and came home to recover and Mandy looked after the house and children and went out with her girlfriends to socialize. Craig would have preferred Mandy not to work (‘It was a lot easier for me’) but like Sally in the previous couple, Mandy wanted ‘something more’ than home life. Both would have liked Craig to spend more time with his family but it did not seem possible in the near future.

The saddest thing I think about him working all those hours, and this is what the government really needs to consider, is that these kids are growing up without [their fathers]. (Mandy)

In this family there was a sense that they would welcome more flexibility in their work/care arrangements. Interestingly, they blamed themselves and the housing choices they had made for their predicament rather than the apparently inflexible long-hour working conditions that Craig endured.

For the builders in this study long hours were required and this factor had a significant influence on care and time at home. The men were primary breadwinners and were unavailable to care for their children or spend much time with their families. Frank and Maria were an extreme version of this gendered pattern and enjoyed their separate roles whereas Tim and Sally and Mandy and Craig were aware of more contemporary pressures for paternal care time and maternal work time. Even though Sally and Mandy in particular talked about aspirations for more egalitarian domestic labour, there seemed little opportunity to achieve them.

Discussion

In these two sex-segregated industries, two different responses to the allocation of care time at home were seen. Both building and nursing were constrained occupations. Nursing involved set work shifts and had to respond to patients’ needs for constant care and building was constrained by the need for daylight hours and reasonable weather. They were occupations where gendered attributes were specific and defining: nursing was associated with women’s capacities to care and construction associated with men’s strength and physical skills and endurance. These gendered workplace attributes might be appealing to particular types of workers. Some have argued that nursing, for example, attracts women with traditional gender role expectations (Dockery, 2004). This study found the influences of workplaces on family time economies were complex and diverse. Although both industries required workers to be absent from home, the family care outcomes were quite different. Nurse families in this study used work flexibility to maintain gendered care time for children but the demands of nursing work also invited partners to participate much more fully in family care. Traditional aspirations for maternal care (and some regrets) meshed with paternal participation and new visions of fathers as carers, creating new family time patterns.

By contrast, the long hours culture of building workplaces produced and maintained very traditional patterns of care in the builder families where women provided primary care and men were largely absent from any care activities. The incremental changes in men’s child caring (Hook, 2006) or domestic labour (Kan et al., 2011) observed in national samples were not reflected in these families. Although there was some sense of regret expressed at the absence of fathers, no sustained patterns of change or re-allocation of caring labour time had been maintained.

Couples in this study had work/care arrangements that ‘made sense’ to them, but clearly reflected workplace effects on the family ‘caringscapes’ (McKie et al., 2002). These couples made decisions about the allocation and re-allocation of care time, according to family expectations and workplace conditions. Trial and error, taking opportunities, trying options and pulling back or changing direction were common themes in all of the interviews. In common with other family research a high value was placed on parental care for children instead of formal childcare and there was a commitment to facilitating children’s extra-curricular activities (Craig and Powell, 2011; Maher et al., 2010). But it was also clear that extant workplace flexibilities had a significant impact on what families considered they might be able to achieve.

The nurses’ shift work facilitated flexible caring arrangements and encouraged men into care to a greater or lesser extent. Some women were able to work their way up the career ladder and negotiate egalitarian division of work and domestic labour with their partners while others chose to stay in more limited positions and worked shorter hours because of the flexibility it offered them. By contrast the work arrangements of the builders and the expectations of long hours physically took men away from their families during daylight hours making most care tasks impossible. In these families, men’s inability to (or choice not to) care constrained women’s choice to work to a large degree (Lewis, 2009). This study’s findings confirm Craig and Powell’s (2011) time use analysis where the female nurses in this study used atypical hours to combine paid work and family care and draw men into care. By contrast, the builders’ atypical work schedules reinforced and intensified traditional gender arrangements at home.

The builders in this study felt compelled to be primary breadwinners and work the long hours necessary to achieve this despite the disappointment of their wives and children about their absence or tiredness. The couples’ stories of allocating time to work and care, presented in short form in this article, are significant because they demonstrate the extent to which existing workplace assumptions about work and care are reflected in the diversity, possibilities and change that families can achieve in relation to care.

Pay and the opportunity to increase earnings shaped family time economies in important ways. The ‘common sense’ decisions about which partner would work more often came down to the relative pay of the partners, in line with the extant literature (Kan, 2008). The nurses who shared breadwinning earned more or similar amounts to their partners whereas the nurses who reduced their work earned substantially less than their partners. There were a few examples in the nurses’ sample of partners working in trades and who had reduced their hours to facilitate their partners working. Similarly the builders in this study earned more than their partners and were kept working long hours with the promise of supplementing income with consistent overtime. In this study’s sample many of the builders had management responsibility and earned relatively good incomes, but this may not be the case for others in the industry.

Conclusion

This modest qualitative study of the gendering of work and care is subject to the common criticisms of in-depth interview research. It is based on a small metropolitan sample and perhaps subject to ‘recall difficulties and the ex post facto rationalization of events and feelings’ (Sullivan, 2004: 218). Yet the strengths of the couple interview method were that couple negotiation was visible to the researchers in both the interview and later in the transcripts. It was possible to simultaneously register both men’s and women’s perceptions in their descriptions of everyday family life, their separate priorities as well as shared aspirations. A sense of on-going process, of negotiation and change in gender arrangements for nurses’ families but not builders’ families was presented by the participants in their own words – precisely the kind of information called for by Sullivan (2004). The findings demonstrate that the re-allocation of gendered care time in families is uneven and patchy – but possible, despite the limited institutional support for it in the Australian context (OECD, 2002). It is notable that the workers in this study generated their own options for flexible labour by taking on less secure employment which reflects the dearth of flexible workplace policies in Australia – a non-interventionist liberal context (Kan et al., 2011; OECD, 2002). The findings also clearly demonstrate that couples made decisions about allocating time to work not as individualized workers but as parts of families in their specific local contexts (Lewis, 2009; Maher et al., 2008, 2010). Yet this research also highlights how industry norms and workplace hours played an important role in the changes families could and did make in terms of care.

There is a need for more qualitative and quantitative research on the impact of occupation on the possibility of families reworking care. The findings here suggest that where workplaces facilitated or allowed change, as in the nursing environment, families were able to take up the potential that allowed men and women time to work and care in more egalitarian, satisfying and sustainable ways.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Jenny Advocat for conducting the interviews and for the couples who gave their time and insights.

Funding

This article is drawn from the project ‘New configurations of work and family’ conducted by JaneMaree Maher, Jo Lindsay, Anne Bardoel and Jenny Advocat and jointly funded by the School of Political and Social Inquiry and ACREW, Monash University.

Jo Lindsay is Associate Professor in Sociology in the School of Political and Social Inquiry at Monash University. Her research focuses on families and consumption, gender relations, health inequalities, youth transitions and social change. With JaneMaree Maher she is author of Consuming Families: Buying, Making, Producing Family Life in the 21st Century (Routledge, 2013) and with Deb Dempsey Families, Relationships and Intimate Life (Oxford, 2009).

JaneMaree Maher is Associate Professor in the Centre for Women’s Studies and Gender Research at Monash University and is Director of the Social and Political Sciences Graduate Research Programme. Her research is focused on women’s employment, family life and work and new models of motherhood. She is currently researching public health approaches to childhood obesity and maternal responsibility. With Sharon Pickering and Alison Gerard, she is the author of Sex Work: Labour, Mobility and Sexual Services (Routledge, 2013) and with Claire Tanner and Suzanne Fraser Vanity: 21st Century Selves (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

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