Self-employment, work-family time and the gender division of labour
By Lyn Craig, Abigail Powell, N. Cortis. 2012
111 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Does being self-employed, as opposed to being an employee, make a difference to how parents with young children can balance work and family demands? Does self-employment facilitate more equal gender divisions of labour? This article uses the Australian Time Use Survey to identify associations between self-employment and mothers’ and fathers’ time in paid work, domestic labour and childcare and when during the day they perform these activities. The time self-employed mothers devote to each activity differs substantially from that of employee mothers, while fathers’ time is relatively constant across employment types. Working from home is highly correlated with self-employment for mothers, implying the opportunity to be home-based is a pull factor in mothers becoming self-employed. Results suggest mothers use self-employment to combine earning and childcare whereas fathers prioritize paid work regardless of employment type. Self-employment is not associated with gender redistribution of paid and unpaid work, although it facilitates some rescheduling.
Subfields: Gender Studies, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5deee68f660347338f357e77106c4a7bc0054df6
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Citations in the corpus
- Self-employment and family life: constructing work–life balance when you're ‘always on’ (2014, background): “As Craig et al. (2012) identified in their time diary analyses, selfemployment appeared to be very much a ‘do-it-yourself’ approach or private solution to work–family integration.”