Social Policy & Society 2:3, 231–239 Printed in the United Kingdom
C 2003 Cambridge University Press DOI:10.1017/S1474746403001271
The Work–Life Balance in Social Practice
Te s s K a y
School of Sport and Exercise Sciences, Loughborough University
E-mail: T.A.Kay@lboro.ac.uk
This article examines the extent to which the growing attention being paid at EU and
national level to issues related to work–life balance is reﬂected in families’ lived experience.
It identiﬁes the demands facing families in balancing paid work with other activities, the
strategies they adopt to meet them, and the role played by policy interventions. Attention
is drawn to diversity in family structures and labour market participation throughout
Europe, to differences in the issues encountered by families in achieving a satisfactory
work–life balance, and to the contribution of policy to their strategies.
Introduction
Work–life balance has emerged as a social issue in the face of changes that have disturbed
the earlier relationship between paid work and family life. Throughout Europe the social
practice of modern family households has been subject to a complex array of inﬂuences
that have a differential impact on the shape of family life in different contexts. Alongside
economic and labour market restructuring, political and technological change have run
the changing expectations that men and women bring to the family-building phase of
their lives (T´oth, 1997; Rubery et al., 1999). The interaction of these structural trends
with the attempts by individuals to exercise choice about their lifestyles has given rise to
various work–life arrangements and created a diverse set of challenges for those seeking
to achieve it (Arve-Par`es, 1995; Duncan, 2002). This article examines how families in
Europe are addressing these issues.
The primary focus is on how families reconcile paid work commitments with the
responsibilities of parenting and childrearing. While these are not the only circumstances
in which work–life balance issues emerge, they continue to be more prominent in
academic and policy discourses than those associated with other life stages. To some
extent, this is simply indicative of policy makers’ concerns with the pivotal economic role
played by this core population group. However, it is also a reﬂection of the readiness with
which European adults themselves – women especially – identify this phase of their lives
as problematic (Bjornberg and Sass, 1997). Notwithstanding differences in political and
economic systems, family structure and social class, difﬁculties in achieving work–life
balance during the family-rearing phase are widely experienced throughout Europe.
Considerable variations can be found in the types of problem faced by families. The
most fundamental division is the broad distinction between the work–life balance issues
confronting families that are work-rich and those that are work-poor. For the former, the
primary concern is how to balance the time demands of long working hours with the time
required for domestic labour and family activities; for the latter it is how to overcome
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the ﬁnancial insecurity of underemployment to achieve the stability necessary for family
well-being. The problems faced by the two groups are, therefore, very different, and so
too is the ability of each to act to improve the situation. While highly educated workers
in professional occupations may be relatively well positioned to negotiate favourable
work conditions, low-skilled employees in insecure employment usually have less scope
to do so. Work-rich and work-poor households may, therefore, differ in their level of
dependency on policy intervention.
The article ﬁrst provides a short review of the parameters of work and family life
in Europe, identifying key trends in the relationship between family building and men’s
and women’s employment patterns. It then examines the demands facing families and the
strategies they adopt to deal with them, including the place of policy and their perception
of policy intervention, illustrating the analysis with interview data.1
The article concludes
by considering the extent to which policy interventions offer appropriate solutions for the
problems identiﬁed.
The parameters of work and family life in Europe
Differences in adult employment levels mean that the parameters of work–life balance
vary across Europe. The main conduit for bringing change to family and household
arrangements has been the changing roles of women, with the increase in female
employment as one of the most dominant and persistent trends in the European labour
market (Franco and Winqvist, 2002). The overall upward trend in female employment
has, however, masked the contrasting experiences of women from different social classes,
urban or rural environments, household structures and cultural groups (Rubery et al.,
1999). Such differences have created diversity at the household level.
This diversity is evident in the aggregate employment data that provide a starting
point for analysis of current social practice. Between 1985 and 2000, the EU average
employment rate for women of working age increased from 45 per cent to 54 per cent,
largely as a result of the increasing number of women staying in or re-entering employment
while their children were young (European Commission, 1997, 2001). However, national
levels of female employment varied widely, from 39.6 per cent in Italy to 71.6 per cent
in Denmark in 2001. Over the same period male employment was much more stable,
declining slightly from 75 per cent to 72.5 per cent. Among the European member states
as a whole, the disparity between male and female employment rates was, therefore,
reduced, but unevenly: while the gender gap in the Nordic states was 4–10 per cent, in
Italy it was just under 30 per cent, and in Greece and Spain, just over. The gap between
average male and female employment rates is higher, on average, among the member
states than among the candidate countries, but with differences in each group. In some
countries, employment levels are high for both sexes (Sweden); in some they are low
for both (Bulgaria); in some the gap between male and female employment rates is large
(Greece, Spain), and in others very small (Finland, Lithuania).
Although some convergence has occurred in male and female employment patterns,
those for women remain much more heterogeneous than for men, showing greater
variations between and within countries. The variations can be quite extreme, as in
the proportion of employed women who work part time in member states, which ranges
from 70.5 per cent in the Netherlands to 7.4 per cent in Greece (European Commission,
2001). Member countries with the lowest levels of female employment overall – mostly
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southern European countries – also tend to have the lowest levels of female part-time
employment. Where female employment rates are high in western Europe, they are often
so because of high levels of part-time employment.
Women’s employment rates also display a high level of differentiation within national
labour markets (Daly, 2000). Employment levels are generally highest among the most
educated women, but countries differ in the degree of variation between high and loweducated
women (Rubery et al., 1999). By 2000, the largest ‘education gap’ in female
employment rates for women aged 25–49 among EU member countries was in Italy, where
the employment rate for women who had completed minimum compulsory education was
38 per cent, compared to 79 per cent for women with higher education qualiﬁcations:
a gap of 41 per cent (Eurostat, 2000). At the other extreme, the employment rate for
women with minimum qualiﬁcations in Finland was 67 per cent, and for women with
higher education 84 per cent. There was virtually no corresponding difference for men:
on average, the employment rate for men with minimum qualiﬁcations in EU member
countries was only 1 per cent lower than it was for those with higher education.
Differences in male and female employment patterns are reﬂected at the household
level in gender differentiated patterns of parental employment. The net effect of rising
female employment has been a growth in dual-earner households, which now make up
the majority of households with two people of working age in the EU member states
(Franco and Wingvist, 2002). Dual participation has risen most among couples with
children, and in a growing number of households both parents work full time. However,
the more common arrangement is for the father to work full time and the mother part
time. Again, strong national variations are found: parents’ working hours are most equally
matched in Portugal, where it is commonest for both to work long full-time hours, and
most polarised in the UK, where fathers typically work long full-time hours and mothers
work short hours (under 20 a week).
The differences in male and female employment levels, within and between European
countries, raise a number of issues about household strategies for achieving work–life
balance. Although women’s employment levels have increased, their labour market
involvement remains strongly differentiated from that of men. Overall, ‘there is little
evidence of household working arrangements emerging that are compatible with a more
equal sharing of paid and unpaid work’ (Franco and Winqvist, 2002: 5), which is clearly
likely to affect work–life balance strategies.
Achieving a work–life balance
The extent to which couples freely choose how they seek to achieve work–life balance is a
much-debated topic. The commonly used terminology of individual and family ‘choices’
and ‘strategies’ carries everyday connotations of rational, pro-active decision-making,
which can underplay the constrained context within which many courses of action are
developed (Trif´ıletti, 1999; Tob´ıo, 2001). It is not within the scope of this paper to explore
these complexities, and in the discussion below the focus is not on these processes per
se but upon their behavioural outcomes.
The analysis uses the concepts of ‘strategic’ and ‘day-to-day’ levels of work–life
balance as a device for reviewing evidence of how these issues emerge at a number of
levels of family life. The ﬁrst part of the discussion concerns the extent to which preferred
‘strategic’ choices about family life, concerning family building (family size, timing of child
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birth) and household patterns of economic productivity (who works, and how much), are
affected by the feasibility of achieving a balance between the household’s activities.
This analysis draws attention, in particular, to families that are most constrained in these
choices, identifying the support of poorer families as a substantial policy issue. The second
part concerns how families strive to achieve appropriate balance within this overarching
framework, namely the issues that arise in the day-to-day management of family life.
Strategic issues for families
The paramount issue for families in achieving work–life balance is access to employment.
In the context of reducing social expenditure, labour market participation is critical to
achieve the ﬁnancial security on which family well-being is dependent. The absence
of ﬁnancial security is a major obstacle to families achieving work–life balance. It is
also an issue that affects substantial subsections of the populations in EU member states,
which, like other economically advanced regions, have witnessed an internal polarisation
of wealth. Throughout Europe, low-income families are regarded as less able to achieve
their preferred form of family life, more dependent on state policy to provide basic material
security, and thus more vulnerable to limits in state provision.
The problem is particularly acute in the candidate countries in Central and Eastern
Europe. They have moved from a period of very secure full-time work for both men and
women pre-1989 to soaring unemployment. They have, therefore, experienced many
of the consequences of labour market structuring that have affected western European
countries, but more dramatically and in a compressed period of time (Wallace, 2002:
8–9). These trends have also been accompanied by the collapse of the support systems that
upheld the earlier labour market: ‘in most [applicant] countries, the legacy of childcare
facilities, generous maternity leave and other forms of support enabling mothers to work
full time have also been under threat’ (Wallace, 2002: 9). The combined impact of these
changes has affected household employment proﬁles, patterns of family formation, and
family living arrangements. The changes have also had a dramatic effect on men’s and
women’s adult roles, and hence on gender relations.
Despite the obvious differences in social, political and economic contexts, lowincome
households elsewhere in Europe have also experienced many of these effects.
Among current EU member states, lone-parent households, ethnic minority and migrant
populations, and certain labour market sectors, including low-educated adults, workers
in many types of ﬂexible employment, and rural workers in southern Europe, are all
vulnerable to ﬁnancial insecurity. As in the candidate countries, this has a number of very
direct impacts on the day-to-day living arrangements of families.
These impacts become most evident with the arrival of children, which exacerbates
ﬁnancial hardship and prompts changes in parental work and domestic roles. Although
mothers in European countries commonly reduce their labour market involvement, in
poorer households, both parents may need to seek paid work. Other strategies include
parents − especially the father – working extended hours, and either or both parents – but
again, usually the father – taking a second job. Interviews in the candidate countries have
found that, in extreme cases, the scarcity of adequate local employment can lead to men
living and working away from the family home area to obtain a higher wage. Men in lowincome
families, therefore, follow the broad European pattern of increasing their work
hours with the onset of fatherhood if they can, but this may take an exaggerated form.
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In Central and Eastern Europe, the ﬁnancial situation of many families has been further
exacerbated by post-transition housing policy. Housing provision that was available under
the Soviet regime has been largely privatised, fostering division between those families
that have been able to afford to become private owners and those that have not. One
consequence is that some poorer families have been forced to live in multigenerational
households. In Estonia, a 43-year old divorced mother of two suggested that ﬁnancial
circumstances had become so unfavourable in the post-Soviet period that they could
affect family building, to the extent of discouraging parenthood altogether:
To my mind it all goes back to material issues. If you have no money to feed the kids and buy
them clothes. . . . At work there are so many young women, they don’t dare to have a child.
I would like to have another child but I don’t dare either. If my ﬁrst ones had not been born
during the Soviet period, I hardly believe they would have been born at all.
There is some evidence that these effects may be moderated by state policy. Hungary
experienced similar economic, political and social changes to Estonia following the
democratic transition in 1990. However, the culture of state responsibility for childrearing
remained deeply embedded, and the tradition of extensive state support for families
continued in the post-1990 period, albeit in modiﬁed form. Hungarian social policy is
supportive of family building, promoting a family size of three children as the preferred
norm. Provision for mothers is fairly extensive: childcare allowance paid to women allows
them to spend a period at home after the birth, lasting as much as four to ﬁve years for
those who bear more than one child. In addition to women’s withdrawal from the labour
market being balanced by fathers having to work increased hours to meet the ﬁnancial
needs of their family, problems can also arise for groups that do not ﬁt the speciﬁc criteria
for support, including very poor households unable to support three children and to
qualify for the higher levels of allowance.
Two main policy issues arise from the problems faced by low-income families. Firstly,
although the belief is widespread throughout Europe that family matters are primarily a
private responsibility for the individuals concerned, the one area in which the state is
considered to have a duty to intervene is in securing the ‘material’ well-being of families.
In communities where the preference is for traditional parenting roles, in which women
wish to be allowed to stay at home to care for their children, this requires sufﬁcient
ﬁnancial support to make it unnecessary for mothers to work to ensure adequate income
for their families. Secondly, in cases where mothers wish or need to work, their ability to
take up employment is dependent on the adequacy of childcare provision (Gornick et al.,
1997), and also the availability of ﬂexible working time arrangements (Wallace, 2002).
While access to childcare affects all mothers seeking employment, the availability of state
provision may completely determine the arrangements made by low-income families who
are unable to pay market rates for childcare.
The day-to-day management of family life
The management of family life requires the demands of paid work, caring and domestic
activities to be met and reconciled on a day-to-day basis. Throughout Europe, this is
widely regarded as problematic for families with young children. The crux of the problem
lies in the difﬁculties in providing sufﬁcient human resources to meet both the obligations
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of paid work and the responsibilities of childrearing. The widespread encouragement for
women to further their education and training and equip themselves for employment
has not been matched by the necessary infrastructure to support increased labour market
activity by parents. Formal childcare is frequently inadequate: provision may be limited
or too costly; the hours covered by childcare may not match those of work; and irregular
situations, such as when a child is unwell, are rarely covered. Informal childcare, provided
either within the household, through the extended family or by friends and neighbours,
may also be limited. Changing intergenerational relationships and living arrangements
make it less likely that working mothers can turn to their own parents for support. As one
father in Spain described it, for many families ‘bringing up children is like an obstacle
race’.
The strategies through which families attempt to overcome these difﬁculties are
highly gendered. To some extent, this is a predictable corollary of the continued gender
differentiation in the labour market. Women’s employment levels remain lower than
men’s, and differences are particularly marked at the household level. Although the
number of non-working mothers is declining, women are seldom their household’s
primary earner: in the great majority of dual participation households, the male partner
works longer hours than the woman, and in many households works much longer than
she does outside the home. This in itself is a reﬂection of the constraints on working
parents, but it also reinforces the perception that the labour market is primarily the man’s
domain and the domestic sphere, by implication, the primary responsibility of the woman.
The impact of women’s increased employment on gender relations within the home is,
therefore, muted.
The extent to which the burden of reconciling the conﬂicting demands on the
household falls upon women is a constant theme in accounts of family life. Findings
from interviews are in line with Eurostat data (European Commission, 2002), which show
strong inequality in the distribution of domestic tasks. However, the issue of gender
equality in households’ internal arrangements for undertaking work and family tasks is
complex. While almost all women and men agree that women have more responsibility
for domestic and childcare responsibilities than men, views diverge over the extent to
which this is problematic. The different cultural contexts within Europe mean that very
different subjective perceptions are held of situations that appear objectively similar.
Traditional views of gender differentiated adult roles are widely held throughout
Europe. They are particularly evident among older generations, rural communities, lesseducated
women, and speciﬁc cultural groups. From this perspective, differentiation in
men and women’s roles is fundamental to family life, as a Hungarian woman explained:
There’s the husband who works and provides ﬁnancial security for the family. Then there’s the
woman, the wife, the mother, who creates a warm family home. This is my ideal.
A Greek woman aged 40, who worked full time, nonetheless claimed total control
over the domestic sphere: ‘I’m satisﬁed, because I don’t want Kostas to help. It upsets me,
and I’m serious. I don’t even let my mother touch my home.’
When women are dissatisﬁed with these roles, the consequences may, however, be
painful. Two divorcees from Estonia cited their former husbands’ traditional expectations
of their wifely role as key factors in their decisions to dissolve their marriages. The older
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woman (68) described her husband as ‘like a god in our family; he was raised to be
served’, while the other (42) drew contrasts between her own situation as a working
parent, and his:
Husband came home from work, he was tired and impatiently demanded dinner to be
served. . . . but that I also worked, and the children were small, really meant nothing to
him. . . . Every situation has its limits somewhere. I could not tolerate this situation any longer.
We got divorced.
Many women are critical of men who contribute little within the home, yet couples
do not necessarily look to a redistribution of domestic responsibilities as a full solution to
the work–life balance problems that parents encounter. Problems are not always seen as
a household issue, but as conﬂicting demands on the woman’s time. Men are especially
likely to feminise the problem and distance themselves from its solution. During the
IPROSEC interviews, fathers in Ireland explained that improved childcare was needed to
make things fairer for women who worked and more equitable between couples; similarly,
a Spanish father expressed his criticisms of the inadequacy of state support solely in terms
of the implications for women:
The government seems to promote female employment but does nothing in the way of childcare
facilities, obliging women to stay at home to look after the children, unless they wish to invest
most of their wage on a private arrangement.
Women are less likely to individualise the problem and are, therefore, readier to
identify men as necessary to its solution. A Greek mother felt changes were required in
both the private and public sphere:
Primarily, men should accept their responsibilities as parents and members of the household
so that women don’t have to do everything. Then, public provision should be better adapted to
the situation of women.
Problems and policies
Throughout Europe, men and women face extensive problems in reconciling work and
family life. For policy makers the core question concerns the extent to which these
problems are amenable to policy solutions: that is, the extent to which families consider
policy intervention to be appropriate, and the extent to which such intervention is
effective.
Judging the acceptability of policy intervention by families is a complex matter.
Questioned at a generic level, European citizens generally resist the notion of state
intervention in family life, except in those countries where a long tradition of state
responsibility towards families exists (France and Sweden, and the former communist
countries). Elsewhere, the predominant view is that family issues are private matters to be
resolved by the individuals concerned. However, a rather different picture emerges if state
involvement is more speciﬁcally related to particular issues faced by families. Despite
expressing resistance to state ‘interference’, families support – and in some instances
expect – some forms of state involvement, most obviously in relation to their economic
security. Such involvement includes direct ﬁnancial assistance to low-income families,
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and measures to improve access to employment, including those that address women’s
needs for childcare provision. Most countries are considered to have substantial policy
deﬁcits in these areas.
To what extent do such deﬁcits impact on social practice? In line with their view of
family life as private, many men and women consider family decisions to be personal
matters primarily based on emotional considerations. But it is clear that, among lowerincome
groups in particular, inadequate earned income, and insufﬁcient state support to
compensate for it, can affect decisions to marry, patterns of family formation, parents’
employment proﬁles, and household living arrangements. In some countries, where
levels of state support are linked to family size, the inﬂuence of policy is quite explicit.
Some indications are also found that the logistical difﬁculties of arranging household
activity patterns to accommodate paid work hours and childcare responsibilities may
be affecting decisions about family size and parental employment for some better-off
couples. Women’s de facto responsibility for reconciling these conﬂicting demands is
likely to retrench rather than challenge traditional gender roles. While the role of policy is
undoubtedly limited in inﬂuencing intra-couple negotiations that underpin these patterns,
potential exists for improved infrastructure support for families that addresses structural
constraints on men’s and women’s roles.
Notes
1 The interviews with families were carried out in 2001–02 for the research project ‘Improving
Policy Responses and Outcomes to Socio-Economic Challenges: Changing Family Structures, Policy and
Practice’, funded by the European Commission under Framework Programme 5 (ref HPSE-CT-1999-00031).
See http://www.iprosec.org.uk, 5 February 2003, for details. The contents of this article do not necessarily
reﬂect the opinion or position of the Commission or the other contributors.
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