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The majority of male workers spend full-time hours in the labour market while part-time employment is heavily female dominated. A decade of economic unrest in the UK following the recession of 2008–2009 was accompanied by a considerable expansion in the numbers of men working part-time. Growing male part-time employment is a significant phenomenon, with potential for narrowing gender inequalities in ways of working, inside and outside the home. Applying a gendered lens to men's working lives, the article focuses upon the ramifications of this growing male work-time diversity. Unsettled times can create the circumstances for opening up acceptable behaviours, for 'undoing' gender roles. The financial circumstances of male part- and full-timers, and men's engagement in unpaid domestic work, are compared. Part-time jobs are associated with more financial hardship than are full-time, but they offer up the potential for narrowing gender inequality in the sharing of core domestic work tasks.

© 2015 London School of Economics and Political Science. The paper was stimulated by the relative absence of the working class from work-life debates. The common conclusion from work-life studies is that work-life imbalance is largely a middle-class problem. It is argued here that this classed assertion is a direct outcome of a particular and narrow interpretation of work-life imbalance in which time is seen to be the major cause of difficulty. Labour market time, and too much of it, dominates the conceptualization of work-life and its measurement too. This heavy focus on too much labour market time has rendered largely invisible from dominant work-life discourses the types of imbalance that are more likely to impact the working class. The paper's analysis of large UK data-sets demonstrates a reduction in hours worked by working-class men, more part-time employment in working-class occupations, and a substantial growth in levels of reported financial insecurity amongst the working classes after the 2008-9 recession. It shows too that economic-based work-life imbalance is associated with lower levels of life satisfaction than is temporal imbalance. The paper concludes that the dominant conceptualization of work-life disregards the major work-life challenge experienced by the working class: economic precarity. The work-life balance debate needs to more fully incorporate economic-based work-life imbalance if it is to better represent class inequalities.

The article advocates an explicitly class as well as gender-based approach to the study of couples' working time. It is concerned with connecting two major research themes; variation in time poverty and the organization of the domestic division of labour. The article draws links between these two research themes by means of a review of debates in key studies and an analysis of dual-earner couples from different classes in the British Household Panel Survey. It concludes that it is necessary to incorporate a class-based analysis to reveal how the different dimensions of time poverty intermesh and play out on the daily lives of families, and the resulting ways in which families' caring and paid working lives are managed on a day-to-day basis.

A commonly used typology in the cross-national study of gendered working time depicts variation in the strength of a 'male-breadwinner' model. Yet the question at the heart of these comparisons is actually con-cerned with why differences in women's bread winning exist cross-nationally. In addition, there is a growing awareness of the need to explore variation in gender contracts within societies too, and class is a fundamental indi-cator of heterogeneity in women's bread winning. In this context, this paper investi-gates two societies characterized by somewhat different strength male-breadwinner models: Britain and Denmark. It examines the extent to which women can be seen to be 'bread-winner' workers in the household, and what policies facilitate or impede their bread winning in the two societies. It is argued that although gender-based breadwinner models usefully depict broad differences in societal work patterns, their relative neglect of non-gendered dimensions of inequality - such as class - lead to their underestimating variety in women's experiences within societies and neglecting such non-gender-based factors which may unite women cross-nationally.

Why, given all the problems associated with part-time employment in Britain, do women work part-time at all? Does the answer to this question lie in gender-based explanations which focus on womenís caring responsibilities? This paper addresses these issues by focusing on the relative experiences of the largest group of part-timers, women working in low status occupations. It is concluded that a gender-informed analysis of womenís part-time employment is clearly vital, but an awareness of further dimensions of social inequality is required if we are to understand diversity amongst part-timers. Relative to full-timers, part-timers are similar in their life-cycle positions, their marital status and motherhood status. However, incorporating a class analysis shows that part-timers in lower status jobs stand apart in that they are disproportionately likely to have been brought up in working class households and, as adults, they are more likely to be living in very low waged households with partners who are also in low paid manual occupations. It is concluded that women go into the lowest status part-time jobs in specific social contexts and, as a result, we cannot lump together into one unified group, women working part-time in manual and higher status occupations, and then talk sensibly about part-time work and its impact on women. It is essential to examine the interaction of gender and class inequalities to better understand these womenís working lives.

Work and Society provides a comprehensive investigation of the major trends in work and employment. The changing social order and its impact upon the labour market in recent years, alongside the huge changes brought about by new technology and globalization are considered

Research on part‐time work has concentrated over many decades on the experiences of women but male part‐time employment is growing in the UK. This article addresses two sizable gaps in knowledge concerning male part‐timers: are men's part‐time jobs of lower quality than men's full‐time jobs? Are male part‐timers more or less job‐satisfied compared to their full‐time peers? A fundamental part of both interrogations is whether men's part‐time employment varies by occupational class. The article is motivated by the large body of work on female part‐timers. Its theoretical framework is rooted in one of the most controversial discussions in the sociology of women workers: the "grateful slave" debate that emerged in the 1990s when researchers sought to explain why so many women expressed job satisfaction with low‐quality part‐time jobs. Innovatively, this article draws upon those contentious ideas to provide new insights into male, rather than female, part‐time employment. Based upon analysis of a large quantitative data set, the results provide clear evidence of low‐quality male part‐time employment in the UK, when compared with men's full‐time jobs. Men working part‐time also express deteriorating satisfaction with jobs overall and in several specific dimensions of their jobs. Male part‐timers in lower occupational class positions retain a clear "lead" both in bad job quality and low satisfaction. The article asks whether decreasingly satisfied male part‐time workers should be termed "ungrateful slaves?" It unpacks the "grateful slave" metaphor and, after doing so, rejects its value for the ongoing analysis of part‐time jobs in the formal labor market.