Authors: Caroline de la Porte and Manuel Alvariño
Abstract
Work-life balance research has elucidated how policies and institutions shape gendered practices and inequalities in paid employment and unpaid reproductive tasks, especially through policies such as parental leave and care services. Female labour market participation has increased in recent decades, and increasingly policy has focused on decreasing women’s burden in unpaid care work, for instance by involving fathers in parental leave. Yet, while there is focus on the work-care nexus, including from a gendered perspective, the ‘life’ aspect has been understudied in social policy. We propose a novel theorization of the interaction of these three domains, by bridging work, welfare and feminist social policy literature with insights from sociology literature on leisure. This enables us to theorize the intersection between work/life, life/family, and work/family. We offer initial evidence for how policies enable and constrain the distribution of work, care and free time, based on the time use survey database (HETUS).