‘It’s One Rule for Them and One for Us’: Occupational Classification, Gender and Worktime Domestic Labour

Abstract

In this article, we focus on gender and class to investigate worktime domestic labour. Methodologically, we extend a novel, comparative critical realist method in which occupation-based and gendered positions in productive and reproductive labour are foregrounded. By building theoretical connections between labour process conditions and collective rule-following practices, we illustrate how inequalities are inscribed organisationally. Our analysis provides a more critical contextualisation of technological affordances to develop the literature on how technology is implicated in the reproduction of social inequality. Moreover, our analysis identifies multi-level causal processes, which combine to explain the presence and actualisation of worktime domestic labour or its absence, which is due, principally, to fear of sanction. For realist researchers interested in diversity-based challenges, absences are important because they can point towards specific discriminatory mechanisms. Our investigation thus revealed a surprising level of class-related in-work inequality within the gendered dynamics of domestic work.