Work-family interface and gender equality

The financial demands and cost of living on the Indian families are tremendously increasing. As a result women which is known as homemakers are forced to go for jobs. Working women are faced with lot more challenges. The major burden of running the family is on the shoulders of women. They have to take up a 9-5 job plus handle all the household chores.
In this paper, life of working women both married and never married in different services sector organizations of Mumbai is investigated. Population used for the study was all working women working who commuting by the local train.
The study employs data that include qualitative information. Qualitative data include primary source. It is collected through a survey (self administered questionnaire).Interview schedule has been carried out between March 2012 and April 2012.Respondent have been selected from the Mumbai area like Dadar, Ghatkopar, Thane, Bhandup, Vikroli, Govandi and in Navi-Mumbai (Airoli , Ghansoli, vashi, ) of Maharashtra State.
The study shows that married working women faced more problems like balancing work-family life; less leisure time, less autonomy than never married working women. Very less amount of money is spent on health, major spending is done on household things.

Power-resource approach based on Esping-Andersen’s views has been criticized, not considering women’s different experience on family care work. The welfare state should be understood as ‘a gendered power’ which enhances or alleviates gender inequality, supporting different type of family provisions embedded in institutional frameworks. Family policies involve gendered conceptions who are primary care givers, affecting gendered division of care work in family relationship.
Family policies can be divided into the following three types; Time-off, Cash, and Service as care provisions of family policy. Time-off involves a care conception of private duty, releasing economic needs. Cash indicates direct benefit transfer to private households increasing purchasing power. Service conceives care by public institutions to replace private care duty of families or women.
I will examine how different institutional frameworks embedded in family policies conceive care relation and how these affect gender inequality in care work. Especially, I will focus on different care time within couples and relational dynamics held in household contexts. For empirical evidence, I will use multilevel/hierarchical model to analyze both country and individual level. As data sets, I will use MTUS (Multinational Time Use Study) and OECD statistics.

The recent rise in age at marriage, reduction in fertility and increase in the life span of men and women in Iran make this country an interesting place to study different aspects of family development (i.e. children’s birth, growth and departure from the parental home). Using the 2009 Time Use Survey, representing urban areas of Iran, this paper shows socio-economic differences in the timing of major family development stages and the spouses’ role behaviour as they go through successive stages. The results show that (1) the timing of these stages and the associated role behaivour vary by level of education for both wives and husbands, (2) the role behaviour (particularly occupational, parental and domestic roles) greatly varies between wives and husbands and (3) both the timing and the role behaviour trivially vary by the family’s economic status. These results not only contribute to the knowledge of family dynamics in Iran, but also help programme planning aimed at assisting people as they go through their life course. Future studies are needed to describe the spouses’ role expectations at each family development stage to provide a better understanding about gender role structures within family.

The process of union formation and, consequently, the context of childrearing have deeply changed in Italy in the last decades. The increase in non-marital cohabitation has been accompanied by an impressive spread of out-of wedlock births. The possible consequences of these changes on gender role-set within couples are quite unknown in this country. In particular, there is no clear evidence whether (and how) Italian married and unmarried parents differ in childrearing practices.
In this paper, we aim to verify whether a more egalitarian gender role-set is found among childless cohabiting couples in Italy and if persists for those who have a pre-school child, using a sample from the 2008/09 Time Use Survey. We expect that cohabiters are more egalitarian in sharing unpaid work and childcare, but we want to verify whether this is explained by the cohabitation in itself or rather by differences in individual and couple characteristics (such as labor market participation and education level). A special attention will be dedicated to fathers' role according to the kind of couple.

Labor force participation of Mexican women has shown an accelerated and constant increase in recent decades. However, women often face limited opportunities and differentiated entry into the labor market because they need to combine work and family obligations. This paper will examine the role of the household workload, as an approach to family obligations, in a double selectivity process (the decision to work and if this job could be or not as a salaried worker) that could be present in the Mexican labor market. We use data from the National Survey of Occupation and Employment, 2009 (ENOE) a national representative sample of the women population aged 15 to 75 years old. We fit a bivariate probit model with sample selection. The results indicate that there is a double selection process in the labor market. Household workload has an important role in this process. Its effects are noticeably stronger in the labor market participation. For those women who cross the barrier imposed by household workload their participation in salaried work could be incentivized.

This paper focuses on the association between ‘family and work’ and presents research-based evidence to address varying strategies of female migrants to deal with the paradoxical combination of family and work. In particular, this analysis aims to examine appropriate theoretical models regarding the association between family characteristics and female immigrants’ work outside the home in multicultural and multiethnic context. It highlights native-migrant differentials, and the differentials between migrants by ethnic origins with regard to the association between ‘family and work’. The multivariate results of this analysis support the key fact that the substantial effects of family on women’s work outside the home tend to persist beyond the influence of migration status and ethnic diversity. Further, the results confirm that the strategies of female migrants to deal with the paradoxical combination of family and work vary substantially in terms of their ethnic backgrounds.

Housework allocation from a gender perspective has been the focus of extensive research over the past decades, as the gender division of household labour is a crucial component of the continued existence of gender stratification. Couples often experience conflicts in relation to household work. In Sweden this has been explained by the fact that gender equality, both at home and at work, is strongly normative, but not always matched by an equally egalitarian situation in the family. Perceived fairness of housework sharing can therefore differ from the ‘objective’ share of total housework hours. If the sharing of housework is perceived as unfair, the level of conflict about home tasks is also likely to increase. The aim of this paper is to explore the relationship between housework sharing (egalitarian/non-egalitarian), perceived fairness of the division and frequency of conflicts about home tasks. Our research approach is explanatory and we will develop a typology using latent class analysis. The analysis will be based on data from the 2009 round of the YAPS survey of 1054 Swedish young people living with a partner.