Research
You will find a complete range of our peer-reviewed monographs, multi-authored and edited works, including original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive.
Policy Press also publishes policy reviews and polemic work which aim to challenge policy and practice in certain fields. These books have a practitioner in mind and are practical, accessible in style, as well as being academically sound and referenced.
Books: Research
This final chapter draws together the arguments presented in the book relating to how men’s fathering identities and women’s attitudes, in conjunction with the terms and conditions of their respective public and private sector employment and workplace cultures, shape how partners divide childcare and housework. The overall findings and conclusions from this longitudinal study are considered and their implications for our understanding of paid work, unpaid work, families, and gender are explored. The chapter includes a reflection on the current limits of change, suggesting how we might establish more equitable divisions of domestic labour in the future.
This book offers a unique look into how couples manage paid employment, housework and childcare. The author explores how employment structures, policies and practices intersect with individual attitudes to either reinforce or challenge gender inequalities in the domestic sphere through the ‘doing’ and ‘undoing’ of gender.
The book introduces a new typology of fathering as a key mechanism through which policies affect domestic divisions of labour, demonstrating how this typology shapes the tasks men undertake and the impact of this on women’s ability to act on their ‘preferences’ about how to combine paid work and home
By examining couples' negotiations of housework and childcare, the book highlights the disparity between men’s and women’s reports on household duties, revealing distinct gendered differences in how these tasks are conceptualized and measured.
This chapter outlines the focus of the book, that is, how couples in conjunction with the terms and conditions of their respective public and private sector employment divide childcare and housework. It contextualizes the focus on paid employment, highlighting how it may shape domestic divisions of labour, particularly in the context of the global COVID-19 pandemic. It then provides a detailed explanation of the longitudinal study on which the book is based, including a description of its methods, before providing a summary of each chapter.
This chapter draws on data from the second set of interviews, in which ten of the original parent couples were re-interviewed. The first part of this chapter begins by setting the scene, outlining the changes in the couple’s circumstances since the first interview, covering the number and ages of their children, their working hours, and their job sector. As part of this scene-setting, the mothers’ attitudes and fathering identities concerning where they located paid work in their lives now that their children were older is explored. The chapter goes on to discuss the effect of the pandemic on couples’ work practices and the divisions of specific household tasks generated by the pandemic, particularly home schooling, but also more generally. It then goes on to focus on specific task divisions that presented significant change or resistance to change in respect to their gendering since the first set of interviews.
This chapter provides an overview of the literature on domestic divisions of labour to provide a framework for the chapters that follow. It looks, first, at how domestic tasks have been conceptualized, before discussing the differences between public and private sector employment which constrain what is possible in terms of de-gendering domestic divisions of labour. It then considers how gendered moral values and responsibilities influence both how couples think they should behave and how these gendered discourses are incorporated into state policies on parental leave and childcare provision, exploring how working practices and childcare provision shape the context within which couples negotiate the division of housework and childcare. Where relevant, attention is drawn to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.
This chapter draws on data from the first set of interviews and explores how the working fathers to whom the mothers were partnered navigated their commitment to paid work and the home. The chapter begins by outlining a typology of fathers that inductively emerged from the data: ‘breadwinner fathers’ and ‘work-and-care fathers’. Drawing on these typologies, the chapter explores how these different understandings of fathering, alongside the terms and conditions and work cultures of their public and private sector employment, shaped how these men combined paid work and spending time with their children. It explores their use of paternity leave, decisions surrounding working hours, and their responses to different ways of working and opportunities for promotion.
This chapter draws on data from the first set of interviews, exploring the experiences of 25 working mothers combining paid work and childcare responsibilities. In the context of ‘good mothering’ ideals and moral responsibilities which conflate women and care, it examines how the mothers felt returning to work after the birth of their children. It explores how they located work in their lives, the decisions they made concerning how to reconcile paid work and mothering demands, and the challenges they faced in doing so in the context of their respective UK public and private sector employment.
This chapter examines how the 25 couples divided childcare on a daily/weekly basis, drawing on data from the first set of interviews and the couples’ joint creation of their ‘household portrait’. A distinction is made between two categories of childcare, namely ‘everyday’ childcare, which can be planned for and organized around a couple’s respective working hours, and ‘unpredictable’ childcare, which requires parents to take time off work at very short notice, causing more disruption to a parent’s working day. It provides an in-depth analysis of couple’s discussions of how they divided individual childcare tasks and their reasoning for them, paying attention to how the terms and conditions and work cultures of their public and private sector employment, alongside fathering identities, shaped divisions of labour.
This chapter examines how the 25 couples divided housework tasks, drawing on data from the first set of interviews and the couples’ joint creation of their ‘household portrait’. Within this chapter, the categorization of work-and-care and breadwinner fathers, which was developed in relation to the fathers’ attitudes to work and childcare, is used to capture how housework was divided. The chapter identifies the shared assumptions and conflicting reasoning behind who is responsible for tasks and how they are carried out, providing a fine-grained task-by-task analysis of task divisions across areas such as cooking, laundry, and cleaning, and strongly gendered tasks such as kin work (woman-typed) and ‘man-typed’ tasks such as home improvements and DIY.
This chapter evaluates one of the oldest big data and algorithmic control technologies used by public employment services (PES) – profiling algorithms. By developing a sociological review of 14 deployments, we illustrate the gap between the stated ambition of these algorithms, and how they operate in practice at the front line of PES. Our exploration shows how digitalisation goes wrong, accelerating and weaponising the bias of the labour market in the very system that is supposed to be a counterbalance to such biases – a new form of ‘double activation’. In a similar vein, we demonstrate how and why the accuracy of these profiling algorithms is highly problematic.
