This project deals with a social class paradox in work-life balance. On the one hand, most resources designed to reconcile work and family life of employed parents in Spain are used by middle-class families and employees who enjoy stable working conditions. On the other hand, and despite the more extended use of family policies, research has not proven that these families have more egalitarian divisions of parenthood than working-class families. Working-class families have often equally or more egalitarian divisions of work than professionals from upper social classes. Even if we may expect those middle-class families and the “educational elite” to be the front-runners of gender equality and equitable work-life balance, this is far from reality.

This project is part of the coordinated research project Social Class Bias in Parenting and Domestic Work: Practices and Policies (CLASSPARENT). The general goals of the coordinated project are: (1) understanding how mothers and fathers in different class positions organised parenthood and domestic work over the life course; (2) how family policies interact with different social class positions to create gender equality in daily life; (3) the role of family policies during and after the pandemic crisis to guaranty parents’ work attachment and gender equality; and (4) how the experience of parenthood intersects with immigration background, class, and gender in different national institutional contexts in Europe.

The first subproject Couples’ Divisions of Paid and Unpaid Labour over the Life Course across Social Class– connected to general goals 1, 2 and 4 - aims at answering the question of how family policies interact with different social class positions to create gender equality in couples over the life course from 2004/5 to 2018. It will be based on focus groups for working-class workers with family responsibilities and three large representative surveys: the ‘Muestra Continua de Vidas Laborales’ (MCVL), the ‘Encuesta de Fecundidad’ 2018 (INE) and the Ad-hoc Module on WLB of the European Labour Force Survey 2018 (EU-LFS-AHM) harmonised by Eurostat. All three surveys offer cross-sectional data for 2018 and some retrospective information on employment trajectories, and the use of leave policies of people with children below age 15.

Scientific-technical Impact of the results

Our results will  help to overcome the middle class bias  and female bias by focusing on working class families and men. With respect to the scientific impact, we want to increase the knowledge among the community of researchers, teachers and Master students about the social and political drivers of family policies that promote gender and social equality. We intend to publish articles in scientific journals and book chapters in international collaborative publications and plan to participate and coordinate working groups at national and international scientific conferences. With respect to the technical impact, we will contribute to evidence-based policy making through our participation in public debates that aim at improving work life balance in Spain. Our results will provide evidence on how to design and implement public and companies’ work life balance policies to advance towards a more inclusive society. To transfer the results to society, we will organize at the end of the project a public conference together with two associated partners from the civil society. This will be the opportunity to atract the attention of Media to our research results.