Balancing family work and paid work: gender-based equality in the new democratic family

Abstract

For most parents, life is no longer a matter of being a parent or a worker--it's both. The traditional gender-based family model was based on role specialisation whereby mothers focussed on family work while fathers were responsible for generating the income to support the family. While mothers were excused from earning an income, fathers were largely excused from day-to-day family caring obligations. But the emergence of the democratic family means that roles are not meant to be ascribed simply because of gender but are to be negotiated and shared. At the level of ideology at least, mothers are encouraged to participate in the public world of paid work and fathers are to participate more in the private world of family caring. While this new deal of gender equality is widely accepted in theory we have not been so successful in working out how to live the new deal. Both mothers and fathers have largely been expected to add responsibilities and work to their already crowded lives. Numerous studies have demonstrated that simply doing two full-time jobs (parenting and waged work) is extraordinarily difficult for any individual and results in considerable stress and can result in degraded parenting and degraded relationships. The demands for an individual in doing both roles has been shown to be particularly demanding on mothers who, despite taking on paid work, continue to do the lion's share of the domestic work. The experience of the competing demands of family and of employment is not uniform. Many factors shape the experience. The workplace itself, the structure of the immediate family (partnered, number of children, age of children), the availability of supports from one's wider family and friends, the availability of childcare and many other considerations all contribute to the experience of tensions between work and family and the capacity to manage these tensions. The paper by Losoncz and Bortolotto (2009) provides a way of summarising the different types of experiences of mothers. Using nationally representative data they identify six broad ways in which mothers experience the need to manage both work and family lives. They describe the range of types including those who manage both roles well through to those who struggle rather unsuccessfully. Their research draws attention to both the variety of experiences and some of the factors tied to these experiences. As such it provides the basis for further thinking about how those who struggle with the balancing act might be helped to manage better. Men and women have experimented with many ways both to parent and hold down a paid job. Many of these approaches involve mothers and fathers sharing the domestic load more evenly. The theory sounds great. As mothers generate an increasing share of the responsibility for earning the family income so fathers are to play a larger role in domestic work and family care. But ample research has demonstrated that mothers who hold down even full-time jobs continue to be responsible for the larger part of these family responsibilities. Many governments have or are considering ways to encourage fathers to play a larger part in domestic and family caring responsibilities. Increasingly fathers of newborn children have access to either paid or unpaid leave as a means of both supporting the mother but to get fathers involved in daily family activities from the time their child is born. Sweden is frequently looked to as being at the leading edge of policies and practices to promote gender equality and sharing in parenting roles by both parents. Thomas and Hildingsson's (2009) paper on the domestic division of labour between parents of newborn children provides insight into the situation in a country that is at the leading edge of policies to promote greater gender equality. It is sobering to learn that despite enlightened paternity leave policies that considerable evidence of gender inequity in relation to domestic work and childcare persists despite enlightened policies. …