The Adult-worker-model Family and Gender Equality: Principles to Enable the Valuing and Sharing of Care

Abstract

There is now agreement in the literature that the male-breadwinner-model family, in which men took primary responsibility for earning and women for the unpaid work of care, has been substantially eroded (Crompton 1999; Lewis 2001a). There is also substantial agreement that the actual patterns of family formation and dissolution and labour-market participation have changed, but there has been, if anything, a more rapid shift still in normative ideas about the contributions that women especially should make to families, and in the goals of social and labour-market policies. There is of course substantial variation between countries in the degree of change in social trends, policy assumptions and policy development. But given the steady (and in some countries dramatic) rise in female labour-market participation together with large-scale family change, which has resulted in a rapid increase in lone-mother and single-person households, policy-makers may feel justified in making assumptions regarding increasing individualization, in the sense of increasing self-sufficiency. However, parttime employment for women is extremely common in most Northern and Western European countries, which alone is sufficient to undermine any such simple assumption. How care work is to be accommodated in this new model is also a major issue, but one that has often been subordinated to economic and labour-market concerns and hence has received only partial acknowledgement in policymaking.