Gendering of Time Management: Perceptions and Experiences of Working Women

Abstract

Understanding and experiencing time has been historically and socially formed by various bodies of power and control who have advocated commodifying clock time of the capitalist economy. This has significantly impacted the lives of working people in general and working women with care and domestic duties in particular. So, many studies have demonstrated the gendering of time management in the Western workplace, but none so far – to the best of the authors’ knowledge – has been reported in the Middle Eastern countries in general and in Syria in particular. Here comes the contribution of this study, which investigates a sample of Syrian women with paid work duties by conducting in-depth, face-to-face, semi-structured interviews. The investigation explores the individual perceptions of time as well as the individual experiences of time management regarding the participants’ paid and unpaid work duties. The focus here is on identifying and explaining the internal and external factors which drive the participants’ perceptions and experiences. The interview narratives have revealed that time management is gendered – it requires women rather than men to strike a balance between their employment role and domestic role. However, not all participants were aware of the boundaries between time spent on public paid work and time dedicated for private unpaid or domestic work. In conclusion, the study has demonstrated that gendered time allocation is culturally embedded through gendering domestic and care work, which affected the time spent on paid work in the public sphere. Keywords: time management, time allocation, work, gender, cultural norms