Off-Scheduling within Dual-Earner Couples: An Unequal and Negative Externality for Family Time

Laurent Lesnard (1, 2)

1 OSC - Observatoire sociologique du changement (Sciences Po, CNRS)
2 CREST - Centre de Recherche en Économie et Statistique

Using couples' time-diary data from two French time-use surveys (1986, 1999), this article explores the extent to which off-scheduling within dual-earner couples is an unequal and negative externality for family time. An empirical typology of family workdays is built using a variant of optimal matching, and three kinds of family time are taken into account: conjugal time, father- and mother-child time, and parents-child time. The results indicate that off-scheduling is an unintentional by-product of employers' economic interests and that, since it reduces conjugal and parents-child time but fails to foster temporal complementarity between parents, it is a negative factor for family solidarity.

Mots clés: off-scheduling; optimal matching; desynchronization; synchronicity; family time; time together; family work day; dual-earner couples; dynamic hamming matching

Domaines: Sociologie

Laurent Lesnard. Off-Scheduling within Dual-Earner Couples: An Unequal and Negative Externality for Family Time. American Journal of Sociology, 2008, 114 (2), pp.447-490. ⟨10.1086/590648⟩. ⟨halshs-00338716⟩