Engendering Time

Abstract

This article explores the impact of discourses of workplace flexibility on gender equity. Time Use surveys have shown convincingly how the unequal burden of women's work in the home undermines gender equity strategies in the workplace. They have also become more sophisticated in their ability to contextualize their time measures to capture the gendered processes involved in domestic activity. However, gender equity strategies which draw on these studies are limited in the extent to which the strategies can highlight the multiplicity of timekeeping systems which order social life and the role of working mothers in coordinating these systems. Domestic life generates social time, responding to biological and communal rhythms as well as the logic of the clock. Gender equity strategies which rely on Time Use surveys based on the assumption that only one temporal logic orders social life are easily coopted by the new discourses of workplace flexibility which are foundered on the same assumption. This article argues that there are possible alternative flexibility discourses which do not depend on further de-contextualizing and de-regulating the temporal order. These are more likely to support greater gender equity if they point to the unsocial nature of a temporal order which conflates all temporality into one single logic.