Work-life balance in a gender perspective: how could welfare state increase capabilities of men and women in the flexible labor market?

The paper is focused on work-life balance (WLB) dimension in the actual post Fordist labor market, characterized by increased deregulation and flexibility which have made workers’ life trajectories more insecure and unpredictable. The review of the literature on WLB (Crompton, 2006; Scott et al., 2008) leads to consider the topic from a gender perspective within the transformation of traditional gender role models in society and in families, rejecting the idea, given by the historical strong gendered division between paid work and unpaid care work, that WLB is a “women’s issue” (Ransome, 2007). The theme is analyzed in a capability perspective (Sen, 1984; 1985; Nussbaum, 2000) where WLB becomes a quality of life issue for considering “substantive freedoms to choose the life one has reason to value” (Sen 1999:74). In such a perspective, the reconciliation policies (EC, 2005) should aim at promoting an equality of capabilities, i.e. a combination of functioning that reflects the freedom of a person to lead one type of life instead of another. The Senian approach is applied to evaluate the effects of the Italian WLB policies on individual working lives trajectories, presenting the results of a qualitative research involving a sample of young adult Italian “flexible” couples, i.e. where one of the partner or both, aged between 25 and 45, has/have a short time contract job, married or cohabitant, with or without children. The research considers several central dimensions to a capabilities framework for WLB, including working times, flexibility, employment situation, job security and perceived economic well being, taking into account differences among people in education, age and partner’s work hours (Hobson & Fahlén, 2009). The results show different strategies adopted by male and female to combine working and family duties and how their capabilities to WLB are limited or enhanced by systemic aspects like public services, companies’ policies and the particular Italian “familistic” Welfare State (Esping-Andersen, 2002), as well by meso factors like the presence and quality of supporting family networks (Gallino, 2001). Finally, the paper indicates some types of WLB policies that should be implemented in order to tackle the emerging difficulties in balancing work and family life as well to avoid the strengthening of gender inequalities in social and labor spheres rather than diminishing them (Hardy & Adnett, 2002).