New Insights into the Nexus of Work and Family Care

The division of paid and unpaid labour between women and men

Although the existence of gender inequalities in the division of domestic work is widely documented across countries, research on factors that make these inequalities more or less dramatic is still developing. In ‘Gender Divisions of Paid and Unpaid Work in Contemporary UK Couples’, Anne McMunn, Lauren Bird, Elizabeth Webb and Amanda Sacker propose that shared gender ideology in couples might explain how heterosexual couples in the UK divide and/or share multiple types of work: paid work, unpaid domestic work, unpaid domestic childcare and unpaid provision of care to an adult. Using data from the UK Household Longitudinal Study, McMunn et al. map all combinations of work division, from the most unequal (where one partner, typically the woman, performs a high percentage of the unpaid domestic work) to the relatively egalitarian (where both partners participate relatively equally in paid and domestic work). The map represents a snapshot of the degree of gender inequality in couples’ paid and unpaid work at the beginning of the 2010s.

To understand whether couples’ work division is associated with their gender ideology, the authors superimposed a gender ideology map onto the inequality map. Couples’ ideology could be: shared equalitarian (when both partners hold equalitarian gender attitudes); shared traditional (if both partners endorse traditional gender arrangements, with women and men participating differently in paid and domestic work); not shared, with the woman equalitarian and the man traditional; not shared, with the woman traditional and the man equalitarian. When the household work division is superimposed on the ideology map it becomes clear that couples with shared equalitarian ideologies are the most likely to follow a relatively equalitarian division of paid and domestic work. Interestingly, the couples with the most traditional division of work were not those who shared traditional values, but those in which the man and the women hold opposite views. One might suspect that in such situations the man’s values prevail, but McMunn et al.’s analysis showed that this was not the case; regardless of which partner held traditional values, the couples in which agreement over values did not exist were more likely to negotiate paid and domestic work along traditional gender lines, with women taking the higher share of unpaid work.

Research on the division of household work has been dominated by two theoretical frameworks. The first one sees the contribution to household work as associated with individuals’ resources, such as time availability and wage earned, with the latter more important than the former. Thus, in a couple, the member that has more time and/or earns less does more housework. The second framework, referred to as the compensatory or gender neutralizing framework, suggests that working women do more housework regardless, in an attempt to compensate for breaking the gender norms in the labour market. In ‘Hebdomadal Patterns of Compensatory Behaviour: Weekday and Weekend Housework Participation in Canada, 1986–2010’, Kamila Kolpashnikova and Man-Yee Kan suggest that the two frameworks might apply differently if we consider housework done during weekdays versus that done during the weekend, as well as considering different types of housework: routine (cooking, cleaning), shopping and maintenance.

Using five waves of the Canadian General Social Survey from 1986 to 2010, Kolpashnikova and Kan show that the resource-based framework best explains routine housework participation on weekdays for both men and women. Specifically, for both earning men and women the routine housework contribution decreases with their wage contribution to household resources. At weekends, however, the resource-based explanation applies only to men. For the other two types of housework, the resource-based framework does not apply. In turn, the gender compensation model applied only to women who earn more than their spouses; for these women, the contribution to housework increases during the weekend in proportion to their income contribution.

The impact of caring responsibilities on paid work hours

Most of the existing research on work–life demands after childbirth has focused on women and the way in which motherhood affects their paid work. In contrast, Stefanie Hoherz and Mark Bryan ask what happens to the fathers after the birth of a child. In ‘Provider or Father? British Men’s Work Hours and Work Hour Preferences after the Birth of a Child’, the authors use longitudinal data from the British Household Panel Survey and Understanding Society to explore changes in work time and work time preferences of fathers in Britain in the period 1993–2013. The results of their analysis show no changes in fathers’ work time in the first year after the birth of a child, regardless of whether the mother is staying at home or continues working. However, fathers whose children are between one and five years adjust their working time, with the nature of these changes depending on the employment status of the mother. When their partner is not employed, men increase their working time. When the mother works either part-time or full-time, fathers reduce their participation in paid work, although the reduction is relatively small. Further significant changes in the work time after the age of five are not found.

While the findings shed light on fathers’ working time in Britain, they are also relevant from a comparative perspective. In contrast to British men, Americans increase their hours of work after becoming fathers. German fathers born after the 1960s also start working more after the birth of a child, but only when their partner is not employed. Finally, in Norway, fathers reduce their working hours when they have small children, likely a reflection of generous parental leave rights, but start working more intensively once children are of school age. The findings of the variation in patterns of work by the age of the child in Britain could be a reflection of childcare policies in the UK. A reduction in fathers’ working time was less feasible during the period 1991–2013, as until 2011 parental leave for fathers was limited to two weeks. However, once the child is one, the need to provide for a growing child and possibly cover some childcare costs, makes fathers with not working partners increase their participation in paid work. When both partners are in employment, relatively high childcare costs (at least compared to that available in Germany and Norway) are more likely to be covered by the two partners and therefore fathers do not need to take on additional paid work.

Moving further along the life course, although motivations for retirement are well-researched, workers’ motivations to continue in employment during later life remain comparatively under-addressed. Employment policy discourse around older workers is often predicated upon the assumption of those workers having worked full-time and continuously since early adulthood. However, this work pattern is a traditionally male trajectory which fails to account for the distinct nature of women’s employment patterns. In ‘Life-Course Influences on Extended Working: Experiences of Women in a UK Baby-Boom Birth Cohort’, Josephine Wildman explores the structural constraints that shape the environment in which older women make choices about paid work and family life. Wildman draws on longitudinal survey data from the Newcastle Thousand Families Study as well as on life-course interviews to examine how gendered social structures and norms influence women’s decisions to extend their working lives. Women’s experiences of paid and unpaid work across the life-course function to necessitate, encourage, enable or constrain working beyond state pension age.

Early-life narratives from the study participants demonstrated the extent to which women faced structural barriers to their participation in paid labour, which then impacted both their opportunities and their expectations for future labour market activity. For the women participating in this study, choices were structured by gender, with social expectations about women’s caregiving responsibilities and the range of paid jobs suitable for women proving difficult to push back against. Women who wanted to ‘have it all’ rather than choose between work and family experienced instead the burden of ‘doing it all’. Wildman’s findings give the lie to assumptions that women have free choice over whether or not they extend their working lives. She also concludes that, if women are to work beyond state pension age, ‘joined-up’ employment policies are required to address gendered inequalities across the life course.

Work–family research often emphasizes the impact of caring for children over both the short and long terms, yet little work focuses on caring for disabled children. Because disabled children require high parental involvement in their care, parents – especially mothers – need to dramatically change their involvement in paid work or exit the labour force altogether. A further complication arises from the fact that parents of disabled children often belong to social categories with poorer employment opportunities: they are more likely to have lower levels of formal education, be sole carers and be disabled themselves. Julie Vinck and Wim Van Lancker propose that understanding the participation in paid labour of parents with disabled children requires an intersectional approach that considers the joint effect on employment of having a disabled child and belonging to multiple disadvantaged social categories.

In their article ‘An Intersectional Approach towards Parental Employment in Families with a Child with a Disability: The Case of Belgium’, Vinck and Van Lancker use a large-scale dataset that links parental employment with individual and household data, including information regarding child disability. The first set of results links the presence of a disabled child with participation in the Belgian labour market. Parental employment was negatively correlated to having a disabled child and the negative relationship is stronger for more severe disabilities. This disadvantageous labour market position is amplified by the presence of other characteristics. Thus, being a single parent with a severely disabled child magnifies the risk of unemployment, while belonging to a high-skill occupation group decreases this risk. Finally, the presence of another child with a severe disability is detrimental for parents’ employment. While the data did not allow for disentangling the effects on mothers and fathers separately, it is worth mentioning that the age of the mother is negatively correlated with household employment, an indirect indication that it is mothers, especially younger ones, who are more likely to withdraw from paid work. Overall, findings such as those presented by Vinck and Van Lancker shed light on an area in great need of attention from both researchers and policymakers.

Similarities and differences between women and men in their experiences of work–family conflict and enrichment

While it is well-known that managers of small firms encounter high levels of conflict between work and family demands, little is still understood about how they manage these demands and the associated stress. Moreover, the questions of whether men and women managers approach these challenges differently is still under-researched. In ‘The Same, Only Different’, Emma Hagqvist, Stig Vinberg, Jonathan Tritter, Erika Wall and Bodil Landstad aim to fill this gap by using qualitative evidence from interviews with managers of small firms in Sweden and Norway. They found that all their respondents identified themselves as being first and foremost managers. For both men and women, being a manager was their work identity; what they were doing for work was ‘management’. However, in ‘doing management’, both men and women managers reproduced ‘masculine capital’, the manifestation of stereotypically masculine qualities that are perceived as assets within occupational spaces such as management. The acceptance that doing management requires embracing masculine capital (and implicitly renouncing feminine capital) while at work created differences in the way men and women managers experienced work–family conflict. Specifically, although all managers accepted that conflict was ‘part of the deal’, women experienced stress and guilt about not being able to attend to family responsibilities, such as housework and children – one of the domains in which they could deploy feminine capital. Interestingly, even women without children spoke about the stress that they would have encountered if they had small children, thus showing that even in the absence of family, women feel conflicted when unable to use feminine capital. Aside from its contribution to understanding the work–family conflicts of managers of small businesses and the gendered ways in which these conflicts are lived, the study’s findings add to a wider body of research that calls for a serious reconsideration of the masculine norms in management and their impact not only at work but on the interface between work and home.

The prevalence of negative work–family spillover experienced by women is often explained by the ‘constant caregiver thesis’ – as women are more likely to work in care-based occupations, such as nursing and social work, the emotional demands of caregiving at work compounds the strain of caring for family members at home. Does the same phenomenon take place when men are employed in caregiving jobs, or do they eschew ‘double-duty caregiver’ status by assigning primacy to work-based rather than family-oriented care?

In ‘The Constant Caregiver: Work–Family Spillover Among Men and Women in Nursing’, Marci Cottingham, Jamie Chapman and Rebecca Erickson use data from interviews with, and audio diaries recorded by, male and female nurses in the USA to investigate their perceptions of spillover between work and home. In their sample, men and women reported many similar experiences with regard to their efforts to balance work demands with family life and the strain and fatigue they experienced as a result. Scheduling work shifts around family requirements, contributing to the everyday tasks of household management and trying to make sure that they paid attention to their own children after a full day of caring for others at work were not activities that fell solely to female nurses. This finding provides a counterpoint to previous research that has typically found that for men, negative spillover between work and home is represented by family interfering with work rather than the other way around. The expectation of future conflict between work and family demands – what Cottingham et al. call ‘anticipatory spillover’ – was also shared by younger men and women in the study with no current family caregiving commitments.

The authors did find evidence of gendered differences in the experience of double-duty caregiving. Men, but not women, reported experiencing positive spillover in the form of transferring emotional capital between work and family – emotion-based skills and capacities that are involved in navigating social life. Male nurses spoke about how listening skills and the ability to make a connection with others could be transferred from the work setting to relationships with family members, and how becoming a parent enabled them to develop caregiving skills that could be used at work. Caregiving was not perceived by these men as an inborn trait or natural tendency, but as an ability that could be learned and applied in different areas of life. In contrast, there was no mention of emotional capital transfer by the women in the sample, perhaps because women are socialized to view caregiving as innately feminine and are therefore less likely to recognize it as something that is skill-based and learned.

Refocusing from work to family

While existing research on work–life interface explores how individuals manage the demands and benefits that arise from the two domains, the related question of how individuals experience losses in one of these domains is under-investigated. In the article ‘From Professionals to Professional Mothers: How College-Educated Married Mothers Experience Unemployment in the US’, Aliya Hamid Rao aims to address this aspect using a gendered lens. Studies investigating involuntary unemployment have emphasized the personal distress encountered by individuals who lost their jobs, due to the loss in latent benefits such as social contacts, structured time, participation in a collective purpose, status and identity. The loss of status and identity in particular have often been linked to a reduction in personal well-being and intensification of family conflicts. Yet, as noted by Rao, this model has been derived primarily from studies of men who enter involuntary unemployment.

Through in-depth interviews and follow-ups with women and their partners, Rao parses out in detail the experiences of women who are also mothers and who have lost their full-time professional positions and are searching for new ones. Rao found that although mothers are distressed when losing their job, they appear to feel the loss of work-related latent benefits less acutely than documented in previous studies that focus primarily on unemployed men. Unlike men, women replaced some of these work-related benefits with benefits derived from time spent at home and motherhood: they spent more time with their children, they helped with homework and they built new social contacts via their children’s activities. All these activities contributed to creating a new identity around motherhood. While for women with small children this new identity lasted longer, for women with older children it waned over time.

The study also explores couple dynamics during women’s unemployment. In almost all cases, husbands are supportive and, where needed, increase their participation in paid work to compensate for income loss. Although positive on the surface, these attitudes reinforce traditional, gendered patterns in the division of paid and unpaid work within couples and ultimately they cause women distress by reinforcing the loss of professional identity. Thus, the implicit expectation that the latent functions of employment should be less meaningful for women given alternative social roles, especially motherhood, is not borne out in this sample or at least not beyond a relatively short period of time spent in unemployment.

Future directions

The broader theme of gendered structures and social norms runs throughout the findings of the studies presented in these articles. When we examine the work–life interface and consider the conflicting demands of each domain, we also need to look at what sustains the current divisions of labour in (heterosexual) couple households. As McMunn and colleagues show us, if one member of a couple holds a traditional gender ideology, that is sufficient to render that couple’s household labour divided along traditional lines as well. Social expectations for women to bear the brunt of household labour are difficult to challenge on an individual level and are often internalized by women themselves. Kolpashnikova and Kan’s work shows us how women who earn more than their partners compensate for this transgression of the traditional gender order by increasing their contribution to housework on weekends, pushing their overall contribution to domestic work higher than their partners’ and ensuring that they fulfil both the traditional homemaker role as well as the breadwinner role. In Hagqvist and colleagues’ research, we see how women managers feel stressed when the demands of their paid work prevent them from contributing to household work. In contrast, their male counterparts do not experience the same stress when their paid work hours preclude their own contribution to domestic labour.

This continuing pattern of gendered assumptions about what constitutes an appropriate level of involvement in household work irrespective of involvement in paid work becomes interesting when we consider it in the context of what Cottingham and colleagues refer to as ‘anticipatory spillover’. This is the expectation among (typically younger) individuals, who do not yet have family caregiving commitments, for paid work and family demands to conflict with one another in the future. As parental leave becomes more widely available to fathers, will men’s expectations for future family involvement begin to shift upwards, not only for those employed in the caring professions such as the nurses in Cottingham et al.’s study, but for men in non-care-based occupations as well? What will be the impact of anticipatory spillover on job search activities undertaken by these men, and on their retention or turnover intentions once employed? How will employers respond to young men’s increasing focus on family? While it is more culturally acceptable at present for work to interfere with family life than it is for family life to interfere with work, the possibility remains that demographic shifts in the workforce towards not just dual-career but dual-carer couples may drive structural changes to organizational work time demands that currently pose barriers to the satisfactory fulfilment of both work and family commitments. We look forward to future research investigating these and other issues at the nexus of work and care.