Over the past 40 years, there has been a slow trend toward gender equality regarding time use in paid and unpaid work. However, the gendered division of housework remains. This article examines the gender segregation in domestic work in order to contrast the influence of welfare regimes and employment status on the organization of everyday life. The analysis is based on time use variables according to the type and daily frequency of household tasks. First, a descriptive cross-national study of European countries is presented to contextualise how institutional factors are involved in patterns of time use. Second, a specific case in Spain is studied to assess how employment status influences the distribution of housework. The results show that daily maintenance tasks represent a limit for the equal distribution of housework by gender. It is concluded that women's employment is a necessary but not sufficient condition for gender equality.
The aim of this article is to analyze the difficulties in professionalizing the long-term care system in Spain. Since 2006, the new Spanish law has recognized care as a subjective right, and regulations are being designed to create a framework for its professionalization. Nowadays, family remains the most important group of providers who care for their elders, and women remain the main informal caregivers. Why do families resist using public long-term care services and professional carers included in the new law? The hypothesis highlights sociocultural factors as an obstacle to professionalization of long-term care services in addition to political and economic factors. The results show qualitative data about expectations, preferences, and discourses that women caregivers have in relation to their responsibility. The empirical material includes 25 interviews with different profiles of caregivers and six focus groups with family caregivers. The article suggests that the Spanish ideal of care is a problem for the professionalization of services because the family remains as the main provider of care-without specific skills, knowledge, and abilities.
El artículo pretende dar cuenta, en primer lugar, de las dificultades que acompañan a las políticas de conciliación vigentes en España. Unas dificultades que se ponen de manifiesto a través del análisis de los discursos que los principales actores sociales de la negociación colectiva (empresarios y sindicatos) plantean sobre el tema. En segundo lugar, el artículo explora la existencia de las denominadas políticas de tiempo como trasfondo a las posibles pistas explicativas de tales dificultades, al tiempo que las propone como alternativas a las actuales políticas de conciliación. Palabras clave: conciliación, negociación colectiva, políticas de conciliación, políticas laborales, políticas de tiempo.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.