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Articles

Gender Equality in Time: Low-Paid Mothers' Paid and Unpaid Work in the UK

, &
Pages 193-219 | Published online: 09 Sep 2010
 

Abstract

Policies concerning time use are crucial to parents' experiences of paid and unpaid work and the reconciliation of work and family life. In heterosexual-couple households, gender inequalities in the distribution of paid work and care, working hours, and responsibility for children's schedules mean that mothers experience pressure on time and their ability to work, care, and manage households. Via qualitative interviews conducted in 2005–6, this contribution explores the time strategies of a sample of low-waged mothers in England whose choices around unpaid and paid work are most constrained as a result of the UK's limited policies. The authors discuss alternative policy scenarios, finding that respondents supported policies that challenge gender inequalities in work time, enhancing their time in paid employment and their partners' time for unpaid work. Higher-quality part-time work, shorter full-time hours, and parental leave for fathers would begin to address time inequalities in the UK and elsewhere.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The research project on which this contribution draws was funded by the Higher Education European Social Fund. The data based on the BHPS were made available through the UK Data Archive. The data were originally collected by the ESRC Research Centre on Micro-Social Change at the University of Essex, now incorporated within the Institute for Social and Economic Research. Neither the original collectors of the data nor the archive bear any responsibility for the analyses or interpretations presented here. Many thanks to the editors and reviewers of this volume.

Notes

1 We had planned to define “low-waged” as those women with hourly earnings equivalent to the NMW (£4.20). In the qualitative sampling, however, very few of the mothers who responded to our letters were this low-paid. We relaxed the cut-off point for low waged to NMW plus (0.25%* NMW), that is £5.25 an hour in 2003, for both the qualitative and quantitative parts of the project.

2 Examples of “manual jobs” are sales occupations, machine operators, bar workers, and waiters.

3 In a separate paper (Fox et al. 2009), we examine the men's time-pressured lives in detail, exploring their engagement in and attitudes to unpaid work in the home and their reaction to policies that might facilitate more time for men to care.

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