Feminism Counts by Christina Hughes Rachel Lara Cohen

Author:Christina Hughes, Rachel Lara Cohen [Christina Hughes, Rachel Lara Cohen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, Social & Cultural Studies, Social Science, Gender Studies, Feminism & Feminist Theory, History
ISBN: 9781317986218
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2013-09-13T04:00:00+00:00

Figure 2a. Women’s time-use (minutes per day) by family change. Source: Kan and Gershuny (2010).

Figure 2b. Men’s time-use (minutes per day) by family change. Source: Kan and Gershuny (2010).

Policy analysis of work and care in UK and EU

The work and care project examines the policy discourse in comparative welfare regimes. Quantitative researchers are often dependent on such careful qualitative analysis for understanding the macro-context in which the micro-level processes are placed. As Lewis (2008) and others have pointed out, the policy regimes of many industrialised countries were designed and devised around the model of a male breadwinner family where the man worked full-time and the women cared for the family and was not expected to be employed. This male breadwinner behaviour, in its pure sense, is hardly visible in industrialised countries of the twenty-first century because of the huge increases in women’s employment.

The widespread participation of women in the labour market has gone hand in hand with concerns about declining fertility and a perceived care deficit. Thus, it is no surprise that work-family balance is high on policy agendas. Policies have grown up in different ways in different countries, and the logic underlying the policies can vary considerably from country to country, as shown in Table 2. In principle, there are two extremes that policy regimes can adopt: they can either support adults, undifferentiated by gender, as paid workers or they can acknowledge that men and women are likely to offer different levels of contributions to the labour market. No policy regime takes the extreme adult worker position, but the USA comes pretty close to this and has only offered women rights to unpaid maternity leave since 1996. Scandinavian countries are often heralded as being more focused on providing equal opportunities to women and men, but their policies also allow women’s employment contribution to be different from men’s in having longer parental leave, and rights to work part-time.

Although GeNet research is focused primarily on the UK, one way of understanding what is distinctive about our own nation is to undertake cross-national analysis. In order to link specific country policies with different time-use patterns, Table 3 shows the mean time in minutes per day that men and women spend on paid and unpaid work, for the UK, the USA, Sweden, the Netherlands and West Germany. These data are taken from time diaries of a longitudinal cross-national sample (Gershuny, 2000).

Table 2. Range of models of work–family balance.

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