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Gendered Shares of the Family Rush Hour in Fulltime Dual Earner Families. A Cross National Comparison

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Abstract

There are recognised cross-national differences in the average amount and gender division of paid work and unpaid domestic work and care, but country differences between men and women in the timing and intensity of this daily workload remain under-investigated. Using couple-level time-use data from Australia, the UK, Finland, Korea and Spain (n = 1838), we probe cross-national differences in gendered time availability and constraint, focusing particularly on the early evening ‘family rush hour’. We identify daily time periods during which one partner in a fulltime dual-earner parent couple performs routine time-critical household labor and care, whilst the other partner is simultaneously at leisure. In all five countries fathers in dual fulltime earner couples are more likely than mothers to be at leisure whilst their partner does unpaid work, and this disparity occurs most in the early evening. Multivariate analyses reveal the unpaid work-leisure gap is widest in Korea and narrowest in the UK, confounding expectations that social democratic Finland would be most equitable in this measure.

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Notes

  1. Australia – Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) https://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/Lookup/3414.0main+features262011%20(Edition%202);

    Spain – Instituto Nacional de Estadística (INe) https://www.ine.es/dyngs/INEbase/en/operacion.htm?c=Estadistica_C&cid=1254736176815&menu=resultados&idp=1254735976608#!tabs-1254736194826;

    Korea – Statistics Korea (KOSTAT) https://kostat.go.kr/portal/eng/pressReleases/11/6/index.board?bmode=read&bSeq=&aSeq=273283&pageNo=1&rowNum=10&navCount=10&currPg=&searchInfo=&sTarget=title&sTxt= ;

    The UK – NatCen Social Research and deposited by the Centre for Time Use Research (CTUR) at the University of Oxford https://www.timeuse.org/node/10833;

    Finland – Statistics Finland https://www.tilastokeskus.fi/meta/til/akay_en.html.

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Funding

This research was supported in part by grants from the Australian Research Council (DP150101282 and FT15010067).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

    Lyn Craig

  2. Social Policy Research Centre, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW, Australia

    Theun Pieter van Tienoven

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  1. Lyn Craig
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Correspondence to Lyn Craig.

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Appendix

Appendix

Table 5 Coding of routine unpaid work using time-use data for each country
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Craig, L., van Tienoven, T.P. Gendered Shares of the Family Rush Hour in Fulltime Dual Earner Families. A Cross National Comparison. Soc Indic Res 153, 385–405 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-020-02489-3

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