Young French women in managerial occupations: a time availability perspective
Young French women in managerial occupations: a time availability perspective
At the XIX ISA World Congress of Sociology held in Toronto in July 2018, Arnaud Dupray and Dominique Epiphane presented a paper as part of a session entitled The Work/Family Challenge In Intensive Work Contexts. Their paper drew on a preliminary analysis of two specific extensions of the third wave of Céreq's Génération 2010 survey, one devoted to the characterization of individuals in managerial occupations and the other to the share of domestic and parental tasks within couples.
Considering that most managerial occupations are particularly time demanding and require a considerable level of commitment, the authors assumed that time pressures could be smoothed if one partner reduced their working-time and increased the time devoted to parental and housework time. Hence it was further assumed that the extent to which domestic and parental tasks are shared between the partners should increase the probability of holding such a job position and the time spent at work on a usual working day. Logistic and linear regressions were used to explore these questions.
Among the provisional findings, it is shown that the daily working times of male and female managers are comparable, even though men on average start their working day a quarter of an hour earlier than women and finish around 5 minutes later. Nevertheless, a slightly higher proportion of women managers claim that working time affects their private life (30% vs. 26% of male managers). Of these, women are much less tolerant than men of this situation, with 37% wishing to change their situation rapidly compared with just 22% of men. If women in managerial occupations seem to achieve a better division of gender roles regarding domestic activities, most of the time the division of housework at home is still unequal, with women doing the bulk of the cleaning, food shopping and meal preparation.
According to the hypotheses, the probability of obtaining managerial responsibilities rather than remaining in a job without supervisory duties depends for men and women alike on the time at which the partner is back home or his/her working time. Finally, the extent to which their partner takes responsibility for domestic work seems to be more important for male managers than for female managers, as if the delegation of domestic duties to the husband was not a significant condition for women to have long working hours as managers whereas the opposite is the case for male managers.
