The Influence of Long and Nonstandard Employment Hours on Parental Time with Children in France, the UK, and the USA

Liana C. Sayer, Ohio State University

Parental time investments in children are essential inputs in children’s present and future well-being. Whether parents share child care with partners, or engage in care work alone, is also a key indicator of gender equality. Long and nonstandard employment hours reduce parental time available for children, but more strongly for mothers than fathers, thus widening the gender gap in care time. Levels of child care time, and associations of long employment hours with child care time, vary cross-nationally by the configuration of work hour cultures and cultural context. I use nationally representative time diary data from France, the United Kingdom, and the United States to determine how cross-national variation in temporal conditions of employment and gender regimes influences mothers’ and fathers’ shared and solo time with children Preliminary findings indicate larger gender gaps but lower levels of solo and shared routine child care in the UK compared with the USA.