Guest Editorial

Balancing family work and paid work: Gender-based equality in the new democratic family

David A de Vaus
Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences, University of Queensland, St Lucia QLD

PP: 118 - 121

Article Text

For most parents, life is no longer a matter of being a parent or a worker - it's both. The traditional gender-based family model was based on role specialisation whereby mothers focussed on family work while fathers were responsible for generating the income to support the family. While mothers were excused from earning an income, fathers were largely excused from day-today family caring obligations. But the emergence of the democratic family means that roles are not meant to be ascribed simply because of gender but are to be negotiated and shared. At the level of ideology at least, mothers are encouraged to participate in the public world of paid work and fathers are to participate more in the private world of family caring.

While this new deal of gender equality is widely accepted in theory we have not been so successful in working out how to live the new deal. Both mothers and fathers have largely been expected to add responsibilities and work to their already crowded lives. Numerous studies have demonstrated that simply doing two full-time jobs (parenting and waged work) is extraordinarily difficult for any individual and results in considerable stress and can result in degraded parenting and degraded relationships. The demands for an individual in doing both roles has been shown to be particularly demanding on mothers who, despite taking on paid work, continue to do the lion's share of the domestic work.

The experience of the competing demands of family and of employment is not uniform. Many factors shape the experience. The workplace itself, the structure of the immediate family (partnered, number of children, age of children), the availability of supports from one's wider family and friends, the availability of childcare and many other considerations all contribute to the experience of tensions between work and family and the capacity to manage these tensions. The paper by Losoncz and Bortolotto (2009) provides a way of summarising the different types of experiences of mothers. Using nationally representative data they identify six broad ways in which mothers experience the need to manage both work and family lives. They describe the range of types including those who manage both roles well through to those who struggle rather unsuccessfully. Their research draws attention to both the variety of experiences and some of the factors tied to these experiences. As such it provides the basis for further thinking about how those who struggle with the balancing act might be helped to manage better.

Men and women have experimented with many ways both to parent and hold down a paid job. Many of these approaches involve mothers and fathers sharing the domestic load more evenly. The theory sounds great. As mothers generate an increasing share of the responsibility for earning the family income so fathers are to play a larger role in domestic work and family care. But ample research has demonstrated that mothers who hold down even full-time jobs continue to be responsible for the larger part of these family responsibilities. Many governments have or are considering ways to encourage fathers to play a larger part in domestic and family caring responsibilities. Increasingly fathers of newborn children have access to either paid or unpaid leave as a means of both supporting the mother but to get fathers involved in daily family activities from the time their child is born.

Sweden is frequently looked to as being at the leading edge of policies and practices to promote gender equality and sharing in parenting roles by both parents. Thomas and Hildingsson's (2009) paper on the domestic division of labour between parents of newborn children provides insight into the situation in a country that is at the leading edge of policies to promote greater gender equality. It is sobering to learn that despite enlightened paternity leave policies that considerable evidence of gender inequity in relation to domestic work and childcare persists despite enlightened policies. It must be said however that when mothers work full time, Swedish fathers appear to engage in far more child care and cooking activities than is observed in most other western countries (but they still manage to avoid cleaning and washing!).

One way in which families deal with the need to balance work and family responsibilities is to reduce the level of workforce participation. While a very small number of families do this by fathers cutting down their paid employment and spending much more time at home, the normal approach is for mothers either to withdraw from the workforce altogether while children are young and then return part time as children grow older. The age of children when mothers begin to re-enter the workforce varies considerably and will be influenced by many considerations including financial need, the role that paid work plays in the mother's life, access to suitable child care arrangements and the availability of maternity leave arrangements. The length of time that mothers spend out of the workforce has significant effects on future working careers, labour market power and accumulating sufficient superannuation for a lengthy retirement in later life. Jennifer Baxter (2009) has investigated factors associated with the timing of a return to work by mothers with very young children. She focuses in particular on the role of maternity leave in the timing of a return to paid work.

While the norm now is for mothers and wives to have paid work, this is by no means the universal arrangement. The gender-based specialisation of the past was based, in theory at least, on the proposition that men had a much greater earning power and that therefore it made more economic sense to specialise. In return for being a good provider the husband/father would be enabled to concentrate on earning a living and providing and not being 'distracted' by domestic responsibilities. The wife/mother, on the other hand, was expected to deal with these matters in return for being provided for. The deal was he provides the income: she looks after the home so that he can provide the income.

While the fact that the large majority of wives and mothers now have some sort of paid employment suggests that the old deal no longer applies, there is a great deal of evidence that it still provides the reference point from which new arrangements simply vary. The fact that women continue to do the majority of domestic work and that it is mothers, not fathers, who vary their working hours and arrangements around their family indicates that the basic framework of the old specialisation model is still important in framing how family-work decisions are made. Dina Bowman (2009) investigates how 'the deal' still operates. She looks at how the wives of entrepreneurs manage their husband's intense involvement in his work while he leaves the family to his wife. Once this was unproblematic but in an era where there is a belief in equality, this division of labour can seem incongruous. But Bowman demonstrates how husbands and wives reconcile this division of labour with their belief in equality. In the final analysis they see the arrangement as fair, not because each partner is contributing in the same way, but because they both need the contribution of the other. The mutual interdependence rather than sameness is what enables these wives to regard the arrangements as equitable.

The bulk of discussion and research on difficulties in balancing work and family focus on the difficulties faced by women, particularly mothers of dependent children. This is hardly surprising since it is these women whose lives have changed the most as the dual earner family has become the norm. Furthermore, it is the daily balancing of the needs of young children and the demands and expectations of the workplace where the tensions are most keenly felt, or have been felt to date. But family responsibilities of women are not confined to child care or even to domestic tasks. Family responsibilities never end, they simply change. A life course perspective on work and family is alert to the changing but continuing need for women to balance work and family responsibilities. Research on midlife women has described these women as the sandwich generation because they retain some responsibilities for their children, inherit expectations in relation to grandchildren while also needing to spend more time caring for elderly parents and parents-in-law.

While both formal and informal childcare systems have developed to enable mothers of young children to participate in the workforce, there are no systems in place to assist midlife employed women to manage the demands of elder care. The state relies on families to provide a great deal of the care for older people and in practice this means elder care by women. At the same time women increasingly need to be preparing for their old age by accumulating superannuation assets. They need to work and they need to provide care in their wider family. While child care always has its challenges, at least young children normally live with their parents - or at least with one parent. But in later life, families rarely share the same home and may be geographically quite dispersed. This geographical spread creates additional challenges in balancing work and family. Where elderly parents are living overseas the challenge is magnified again. Wilding and Baldassar (2009) provide an insight into both the tensions and the strategies employed by midlife men and women who need to balance their work life with the accepted need to help care for ageing parents and relatives who live overseas. The authors provide a particularly useful insight into the gendered nature of the way in which these caring responsibilities are linked to their work responsibilities: women reduce work to be with their elderly family while men use work to care for their elderly family 'back home'. The gendered strategy that is evident among parents of young children seems to be reproduced in the ways men and women meet the needs of elderly family members.

The papers in this issue of the Journal of Family Studies (also released as a reader - ISBN 978-1-921348-06-8) demonstrate that the issue of balancing work and family remains a live issue. The balancing trick means very different things for men and women. Despite all the changes, the wholesale entry of women of all ages into the paid workforce, systems of formal and informal child care and an ideology of gender equality men and women continue to manage the dual responsibilities of work and family in different ways. It is clear that the career prospects and income earning power of women are affected by the fact that women continue to have primary responsibility for family care and domestic matters. Some changes have taken place and men do a little more in the home but not nearly enough to compensate for the additional demands placed on women by their paid work.

At the same time men struggle with finding a balance themselves. The ever increasing demands of many workplaces make it more difficult to contribute at home. For many men the invasion of work beyond the simple 9-5 job draws them away from the home and from doing their share. Men and their workplaces still expect men to give priority to their work and this costs them in terms of the rewards that are achievable in a well-functioning family.

Some people might advocate that the tensions experienced by both mothers and fathers as they try to be good workers and good parents would be resolved if we returned to the male breadwinner model. But this model had many costs for women, men and their children. While this might be a good solution for some families I do not believe that it is the way forward. Instead we need to develop ways to enable parents and others with family responsibilities both for young and old family members to enjoy the pleasures and benefits of both work and family lives. Flexible workplace arrangements, childcare, family leave and other arrangements are part of the package but they are insufficient. Time stress is the most commonly cited stress by people in relation to work and family life. There is simply not enough time to do everything that we imagine we need to meet our work and our family demands.

While it is essential that governments and employers continue with initiatives and policies to help people combine work and family responsibilities it is essential that individuals also assess their own priorities, lifestyle and expectations. Part of the solution to time stress is to do less but it often seems that we are incapable of doing less and that the aspirations for 'success' and to improve our standard of living drive us to do more and more while we enjoy life less and less.

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