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This article presents an overview of the gendered distinctions between housework and child care, illustrating those distinctions through time‐use diary research. Following the logic of the gender structure perspective, I discuss findings that demonstrate differences between the gendered performance of housework and child care at the individual, institutional, and interactional levels of the gender structure. I show that distinguishing between housework and child care at these different levels of analysis aids in developing a more nuanced appreciation of the processes that underpin the gender division of domestic work and care, and I argue that these distinctions have important implications for gender theory and policy.

In understanding processes of change in family work, examining differences in the degree of change between different social groups ('changing differences') can be more informative than focusing either on overall changes or on cross-sectional differences by social group alone. British and US time-use data sets are used to examine 30-year changes in men's contribution to domestic work and child care by differences in educational attainment. Changes are compared for fathers in dual-earner couples with different levels of education. The findings illustrate two contrasting changing differences: a 'catch-up' effect over time between fathers with different educational attainment in the case of domestic labour; and in the case of child care, a widening of the gap by education. The challenges posed by these changing differences for common structural explanations of change in family work are discussed.

While recent emphasis has been placed on transformations of gender in the public sphere, changes in gender relations between heterosexual couples in the domestic sphere have been less fully developed in the theoretical literature. The author presents evidence for change at various levels, from the discursive to the quantitative. She outlines a theoretical framework for the analysis of such change based on the "doing gender" and gender consciousness perspectives, readdressed in the light of the new emphasis on discourses of reflexivity and intimacy. She argues for a conception of change that is slow and uneven, in which daily practices and interactions are linked to attitudes and discourse, perhaps over generations.

Quite a lot is already known from the existing sociological literature about the overall time spent by women and men in different domestic tasks, but there is much less information available on more complex sociologically-relevant facets of the experience of time, such as the social context of activities, and the common combinations of different activities. In this paper I use time-use diary data to focus upon three important aspects of the gendered experience of time. These are the social context of domestic tasks in relation to their (gendered) patterns of management, the intensity or density of time-use involving combinations of different activities, and the fragmentation of leisure time according to which activities are responsible for interrupting it. Overall these analyses support the conclusion that women's time is not only more pressured in terms of the intensity of domestic tasks, but that the more enjoyable aspects of their time, such as leisure time, tend to be more fragmented than that of men.

There are only a limited number of studies comparing housework among couples and individuals in different marital statuses, and the focus of attention has tended to be on married compared to cohabiting couples. This article focuses on differences between couples where one or more partner is remarried or recohabiting and those where both partners are in their first married or cohabiting relationships, using nationally representative survey data from Britain. It is shown in multivariate analysis that women in their second-plus partnerships contribute less in terms of their proportion of total housework time than women in their first partnerships. However, there is no effect for the man's number of previous partnerships or for current marital/cohabiting status. It is argued that the significant issue is interaction and negotiation with a subsequent partner in the light of experience gained from the breakdown of one or more previous married/cohabiting relationships.

In this paper the time-use of diaries of a sample of couples are used to explore the relationship between partners' daily pattern of activities and their enjoyment of those activities. By analysing the diaries of couples together it is possible to assess which activities are undertaken simultaneously, which separately, and whether time spent in different activities is more enjoyable spent separately or together. So, in addition to the usual information obtainable from time diary analysis on the domestic division of labour, these data provide information on the quality of time, and the ways in which couples may manipulate it in order to increase the proportion of enjoyable time (which, it is shown, is more enjoyable when enjoyed together). The wider significance of this approach is that an empirical link is provided between `work-related' debates on the domestic division of labour, and those on the nature of affective relationships between couples found within the sociology of emotions.

This paper outlines an analytic framework for the comparative study of housing access, based upon the concept of the `processes of housing access'. The aim is to devise a framework which is generalised enough to permit systematic cross-national comparison, but sufficiently grounded to take on board the wealth of empirical detail on a country by country basis. Defining the processes of housing access in any specific context involves the identification of: a) the sets of social relations that consumers enter into in gaining access to particular forms of housing; and b) the formal and informal conditions of negotiation surrounding access, defined in terms of the characteristics of both consumers and housing. The identification of the dynamic constituents of the negotiation of housing access (during which the underlying relations of power are concretised and reproduced in housing outcomes) involves an explicit focus on the interface of macro- and micro-level analyses. It is hoped that a more widely applicable model for the analysis of access may be developed from the attempt to model housing access in this way.