Gendered Time Flexibility of Overwork: Work-Family Policies and Reinforcing the Dual Obligations of Women

• In Event: 158 - Regular Session. Social Policy

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to clarify the paradoxical mechanism reinforcing gender inequality in postmodern welfare states. Work-family reconciliation policies are becoming a promising design for working mothers, supporting not only equal access to paid work but also parental rights for family care. Like maternity leave or parental leave, these schemes enable increased time flexibility for working parents in order to relieve their role conflicts between employment and family.
I argue that work-family policies strengthen gender segregation in time arrangements, causing women to overwork, as they would take dual obligations. Because these schemes do not ensure the gender-neutral eligibility between fathers and mothers in a male-breadwinner culture, working women, who can more easily arrange a flexible schedule, engage in more ‘overwork’ given their dual responsibilities. For an empirical approach, I use multilevel modeling to compare the institutional traits of different countries at the macro level. The main dataset is the MTUS (Multinational Time Use Study) dataset, which contains individual time diaries collected from 15 OECD countries. The indices for work-family reconciliation policies are measured by multiplying the length of leave and wage replacement.
The results show that family policies involve gendered flexibility by increasing the dual burdens of women as opposed to men with regard to the total amount of time spent engaging in paid and unpaid work. While men are rarely affected by work-family schemes, women must make an extra effort to realize a more flexible schedule to enable dual obligations if welfare states offer stronger work-family policies.

Author

• Sun Mi Cho, Yonsei University