Gendered and Classed Working Time in Britain: Dual-Employee Couples in Higher/Lower-Level Occupations

Abstract

Working time in Britain remains weakly regulated. As a result, there is wide variation in the number of hours and times of day worked and in the types of employment contracts available. Importantly, there are both gender and class dimensions to this variation. In terms of gender, at an individual level there is a gendered polarization in typical working weeks, with women over concentrated in short-hours jobs, and men over concentrated in longer full-time work. At a household level, these hour differences have been mutually reinforcing. If a couple have children, men’s longer hours have meant that many mothers, if they are in jobs, have tended to work short hours to provide child care and, likewise, women’s reduced hours have meant that fathers worked longer hours to supplement this wage loss. The notion of a male-breadwinner model has been developed to express such a prevalent societal gendered division of labour in which women caring for children or other dependants are located at one end of a breadwinner–carer working scale, whilst men are more likely to spend their working lives nearer to the opposite, breadwinner, pole (Warren, 2000).