Publications and articles

Time is one of the most important factors influencing everyday life. Unlike other humanresources, time is allocated equally between everyone. The time available in a day is alwayslimited to 24 hours, despite one’s income, education, marital status, sex or age. Even thoughhigher income and various technological innovations have enabled partial substitution of time bymoney (Levinson and Kumar 1995), no one is able to buy more time. Due to this finite nature oftime, people are forced to choose between different activities and to find compromises in thedivision of time in their individual and household schedules. Spending time on a specific activitymeans less time for other activities. Even though the amount of available time is equal foreveryone, there can be a great variety between people in terms of how they use it and whichactivities they prefer. One of such compromises concerns the distribution of employment andhousehold work between women and men. Throughout time, women have been linkedpredominantly with home and household chores, while men have been regarded as responsiblefor earning money and dealing with issues outside home (Wharton 2005). This article examineshow Estonian women and men spend their time and how employment and household work aredistributed between women and men.

Family as a social institution, although constantly changing in time, is a pillar of the sustainabilityof society. Having children is generally a norm in a family. As this norm changes, the role of thefamily as a guarantee of sustainability of the society becomes questionable. Working has animportant role in guaranteeing sustainability and subsistence of families. According to theEstonian Labour Force Survey, more than a half of Estonian inhabitants are employed and spendconsiderable time in a week on working. People work on average 40 hours a week (full-timeemployees). In addition, a significant amount of time is spent on moving between home and work.It is equally important to be successful at work and have a fulfilling family life, thus thereconciliation of work and family life is a key issue. In the European context there are countrieswhich view facilitating work and family life reconciliation as an important goal in the labour marketand social and family policy and there are countries where little attention is paid to this issue. TheNordic countries (Sweden, Finland and Denmark) are good examples of the countries wherecombining work and family life is quite smooth. This is facilitated by well-developed publicservices, including childcare facilities, and flexibility of the labour market which all enable easyreturn of the parents who have been temporarily absent from it, also contributing to the timeflexibility and work location flexibility. At the same time, combining work and family life is relatedto great difficulties in Anglo-Saxon (Ireland, the United Kingdom) as well as Southern Europeancountries (Italy, Portugal) (Kotowska et al. 2010).