“It’s Not Just the Hours”: Precarious Work and Gendered Organization of Household Labor Time

• In Event: Family Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 6: Families and Class Reproduction

Abstract

The spread of precarious and nonstandard employment has complicated how dual-earner households manage work–family boundaries across the day. While past research has documented the gender gap in the amount of time spent on household work, less attention has been paid to the structure of time: when domestic tasks are done and how they are sequenced into daily routines, especially under conditions of job precarity. This paper examines how occupational precarity disrupts weekday temporal arrangements of domestic labor in heterosexual working couples, and whether such disruptions are gendered. Drawing on the American Time Use Survey (2021-2023) and the O*NET occupational data, I apply sequence and cluster analysis to identify four weekday time-use patterns: Integration (a standard workday with limited household labor), Segmentation (clear boundaries between paid work and domestic time), Fragmentation (frequent switching between paid work and household work), and Intensification (heavy concentrations of care and household labor). Multinomial regression models show that individuals in more precarious occupations are significantly more likely to exhibit the three non-standard patterns: Segmentation, Fragmentation, and Intensification, with especially strong associations for women. The gender gap is largest in the Fragmentation pattern and more modest in Segmentation. These findings suggest that labor market precarity reorganizes the temporal rhythms of domestic life in gendered ways.

Author

• Yue Zhang, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill