Families and inequality in a flexible world of work

Introduction

Families often lead time-intensive lives, having to balance the demands arising from the workplace and the family. With the recent shift towards flexible working – enabling employees to decide (partly) where and when to work – the spatial and temporal segregation of employment and family has been substantially reconfigured. Greater flexibility is one of the most important labour market transformations of our time.

Project Overview

FLIN creates new knowledge on how contemporary families combine employment and family in the context of flexible working. Taking a cross-national, couple-level perspective, FLIN will study the implications of flexible working for:

1. Family time
2. Gender equality in (un)paid work
3. Childbearing and partnership dissolution
4. Monitoring inequality in flexible working
5. Addressing the role of contextual factors

The project design is longitudinal with a focus on the “new normal” of flexible working after the COVID-19 pandemic. FLIN will generate a novel empirical and theoretical understanding of the work-family interface and its consequences, enabling policy development.

Socio-Economic Implications

Because flexible working is mainly a privilege of higher status employees, its recent rise has the potential to exacerbate the socio-economic divide. If flexible working has predominantly positive consequences (e.g. more childcare time), higher-status families could disproportionately reap the benefits of this new development.

Theoretical frameworks and past research are inconclusive as to whether flexible working leads to a better work-family balance or more difficulties in managing the work-family border. Considering that flexible working is an emerging social challenge for equality, clarification is urgently needed.

Methodology

The project combines a detailed country analysis (Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Norway, and Poland) with a comparison across the EU. It is based on high-quality, representative data, including:

• Time use surveys
• Register data
• EU Labour Force Surveys