The role of part-time employment in the balancing of women's employment and family lives has generated an immense literature. Using data on women working part-time and full-time in different level occupations in the British Household Panel Survey, this paper argues that it is now vital to move these balancing debates on from their location within work-family rhetoric and to re-position the study of women's working time in broader work-life discussions. Work-family debates tend to neglect a number of key domains that women balance in their lives, in addition to family and employment, including their financial security and their leisure. The paper shows that examining the financial situations and the leisure lives of female part-timers in lower level jobs reveals a less positive picture of their 'life balancing' than is portrayed in much work-family literature. Instead, they emerged as the least financially secure employees and, linked to this, less satisfied with their social lives too. It is concluded that since the work-life system is multi- and not just two-dimensional, it is important to examine how all life domains interrelate with each other. In this way, we would be in a better position to begin to assess all the benefits and disadvantages associated with working part-time and with other work-life balancing strategies.

The article advocates an explicitly class as well as gender-based approach to the study of couples' working time. It is concerned with connecting two major research themes; variation in time poverty and the organization of the domestic division of labour. The article draws links between these two research themes by means of a review of debates in key studies and an analysis of dual-earner couples from different classes in the British Household Panel Survey. It concludes that it is necessary to incorporate a class-based analysis to reveal how the different dimensions of time poverty intermesh and play out on the daily lives of families, and the resulting ways in which families' caring and paid working lives are managed on a day-to-day basis.

The paper was stimulated by the question of class in work-life debates. The common conclusion from work-life studies is that work-life imbalance is largely a middle class problem. It is argued here that this assertion is a direct outcome of a particular and narrow interpretation of work-life imbalance in which time is seen to be the major cause of difficulty.Labour market time, and too much of it, dominates the conceptualisation of work-life and its measurement too. This heavy focus on a certain type of work-life imbalance: chronometric overstretched temporal imbalance, has rendered largely invisible from dominant work-life debates the types of imbalance that are more likely to impact the working class. Looking at working class employees in the UK, this paper asserts that 'too few' hours working also has work-life ramifications. It thus argues for the necessity of analysing economic -and not just temporal -roots of work-life imbalance. The paper concludes that if we are to continue to pursue work-life analysis, the conceptualisation of work-life needs to more full incorporate economic-based imbalance if it is to better represent class inequalities.

One of the most widely used concepts in the sociology of women and men's work is that of the breadwinner. Given its centrality to and in so many core academic debates, it is surprising that so little attention has been paid to theorizing and operationalizing breadwinning. Breadwinning seems to lie uncontested, with an unproblematic taken-for-granted, common sense meaning in current sociology.The article reviews how breadwinning has been approached in sociology and how it has been operationalized in empirical studies. After identifying different dimensions of breadwinning, the article explores their reliability in a descriptive analysis of women and men's breadwinning work in Europe. It is concluded that the meaning of breadwinning should be debated as routinely as that of caring. KEY WORDSbreadwinning / Europe / male breadwinner / women and men / work

The economic crisis that led to recession in the UK in 2008-9 impacted in multiple ways on work and economic life. This article examines changes to the work-time of employees. The UK stood out for its recessionary expansion of work-time underemployment. Working in a job that provides 'too few' hours can have serious ramifications for the economic livelihood of workers. Working-class workers are central here. Drawing on analysis of large-scale survey data, the article identifies that workers in lower level occupations experienced the most substantial postrecessionary growth in the proportions working 'too few' hours. Did these work-time changes narrow or widen class inequalities in feelings of financial hardship? The article concludes that although middle-class workers also saw their financial positions damaged, this so-called 'first middle-class recession' did not erode class inequalities in financial hardship among UK workers.

Clare (2018) Good, bad and very bad part-time jobs for women? Reexamining the importance of occupational class for job quality since the 'great recession' in Britain. Work, Employment and Society.

We investigated innovative social policies drawn from the European arena -universal systems of childcare, a shorter working week and shared parental leave -asking about their relevance to the work-life balance of low-waged coupled mothers in England. While in principle the policy environment has shifted from assumptions of a male breadwinner to dual earners, in practice severe constraints on mothers' labour market attachment bring women half the lifetime earnings of men. British Household Panel Survey data for coupled low-waged women in England show them as likely to work short part-time hours, have low-waged partners and low household wages while belonging to male breadwinner partnerships in terms of their contribution to household wages and unpaid work; but that few women support this model. Interviews with low-waged mothers show evidence of limited choices, constrained by social policies which offer limited and piecemeal support for working parenthood. Given the choice, low-waged mothers and their partners would find policies available elsewhere in Europe attractive. They see a more universal comprehensive system of childcare as enabling women's employment and improving children's quality of life; a shorter working week as enabling mothers and fathers to lead more balanced lives and a father's quota of parental leave fitting with their assumptions about sharing care.

The size and source of the gender wage gap in Britain has been well researched. Women's typically lower status employment and their reduced, discontinuous career profiles when they have caring responsibilities have combined seriously to damage their ability to earn a decent wage. Such marked gender differences in employment patterns produce a substantial gender gap in levels of wealth too, yet despite this there has been less attention paid to the gendering of assets than there has to gender differentials in earnings and income. So to pull out these multi-dimensional effects of a gender disadvantaged labour market, this article explores the extent of wage and assets inequality in Britain in the mid 1990s. Analysis of the Family Resources Survey shows that women continue to have lower incomes than men even with their increased entry to the labour market, and have fewer chances to build up a safety net of savings in their working lives and a good income for their retirement. It would seem that in a future Britain where individuals will increasingly depend on private pensions rather than a state minimum, even if women continue to increase their participation levels, the poverty they face in old age will persist.