Conferences

Family and paid work are fundamental dimensions for individual projects constituting nowadays a mutual dependence relationship. Gender relations play also an essential role on the different ways of organizing daily experience around work and family practices, expectations and responsibilities.

Exploring the European Social Survey Round 2 (2004) and Round 3 (2006) data we analyse and discuss the connection between the different ways of organizing life between work, family and gender relations. We have tested the hypothesis that women’s orientations towards work will vary less among countries than orientations to care. In some countries, orientations towards paid work can be modern but orientations to care can change more according to a set of institutional, cultural and economic constraints. This picture is drawn, nevertheless, in a scenario of a clear passage from more traditional gender values towards gender equality, opening room for gender relation negotiation in family context.

This private negotiation is a double folded process: there is a cleft between the ideological and the practices levels in the gender relations in the family context. If at the ideological level, both men and women tend to agree in more egalitarian family relationship it is also truth that a more traditional stance appears when gender roles referring to “women’s place in the family” are directly at stake.