Part-time Work and Time for Care: The Consequences of Four Policy Designs

Part-time work, as a method for reconciling work and family, has been regarded as both part of the solution and part of the problem. Some see it as a way of maintaining women's earning capacity. Others have noted that part-time work encourages women to focus on their family responsibilities at the cost of their career. Germany, Australia, Finland (along with the USA and Canada) and the Netherlands represent four contrasting positions on using part-time work to balance work and family. Germany has policy arrangements that assume that the care of young children will be assigned to their mothers and encourages this outcome. Australia has a long experience of viewing the one-and-a-half earner family, in which the woman works part-time, as a solution. Finland eschews part-time work. Both women and men are typically employed full-time while non-parental child care is publicly provided. The USA and Canada exhibit a similar pattern of full-time employment for both sexes but both countries rely on private provision of non-parental child care. The Netherlands has recently moved in the direction of part-time work for both men and women, holding out the prospect of shared care. The aim of this study is to establish how these different work/care regimes impact upon the gender division of labour, specifically examining time spent in non-market work and parental time devoted to children within families. It uses data from the recent national Time-Use Surveys in Australia, Germany, Finland, Norway, the USA, Canada and the Netherlands.