Juggling work and family is a significant challenge for many contemporary households. In the majority of families, women continue to perform a majority of unpaid care work. Flexible working is often used as a method to enable better labour market integration of women. Since 2014, the ‘right to request’ flexible working has been extended to all UK employees who have been employed for at least 26 weeks. Despite the fast expansion of rights and the rise of a flexible model, very little is known about whether such policy changes are effective in promoting the actual use of work flexibility for both men and women, and how they influence individuals and households.
This Fellowship will focus on dual-earner couples and will use rigorous statistical methods to evaluate the causal impact of the ‘right to request’ flexible working policy change on several aspects of couples’ lives in the short and longer term. These will include the use of flexible working arrangements, division of unpaid care work, job satisfaction, relationship satisfaction, life satisfaction and mental health. This project will use unique design features of the Understandings Society data, including using household information to assess the impact at both individual and couple levels and using socio-demographic information to assess whether impacts differ by gender, parenthood status, ethnicity, socio-economic status, working hours, and geographical areas.
