Dreams versus reality: wishes, expectations and perceived reality for the use of extra non-work time in a 30-hour work week experiment

ABSTRACT

In 2019, a Belgian women’s organisation experimented with a 30-hour work week for all of their full-time employees. This work time reduction was an excellent opportunity to study these female employees’ wishes, expectations and experienced reality concerning their extra non-work time. Their wishes and expectations – as well as how these relate to their perceived reality – was studied through longitudinal questionnaires, in-depth interviews and focus groups. The women wished for more time for themselves and their intimate relationships. However, their wishes reflected an ideal situation. Their expectations reflected their wishes but were slightly more realistic. The perceived reality did not fulfil all of their wishes. The ‘me-time’ that they wished for prior to the experiment did not always emerge to be the ‘me-time’ that they had. Some women appropriated a less conventional form of ‘me-time’, such as housework, which helped them to ease their mind and relax. Others felt unable to fulfil their wishes through (social) context factors such as the embeddedness of time structures, time schedules and the rhythms of family and friends. This paper reflects on the gendered norms and values and inequalities in time use that can help to explain the discrepancies between preferences and experienced reality.

KEYWORDS:

• Shorter work week
• time use
• work time reduction
• 30-hour work week
• wishes and expectations

Declaration of conflicting interest

The organisation that experimented with the 30-hour workweek, Femma vzw, on which this research is based contacted the research group and contributed a small part of the cost of the data gathering. However, in our contract with Femma is stated that the research group owns the gathered data and are independently free to analyze and publish findings. The research group later was granted funding from an independent research funding institution (FWO) to further analyses and publish research articles like this one.

Notes

1 In Belgium, there is no school on Wednesday afternoons.

Additional information

Funding

This project is funded by Research Foundation Flanders (Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek Vlaanderen) [grant number: G019020N] and was approved by the Ethics Committee of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel.

Notes on contributors

Francisca Mullens

Francisca Mullens is PhD researcher at the Sociology department of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. She is currently working on a project researching the impact of a shorter workweek on employees personal and work lives based on a 30-hour workweek experiment. This research is mainly based on time-use data.

Ignace Glorieux

Ignace Glorieux is full professor of sociology at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. He teaches courses on social theory, social inequality, sociology of time, and methodology. He is involved in time use studies in Flanders and Belgium, in a longitudinal study on the transition from school to work and in different research projects on cultural practices and cultural participation. He is the president of the International Association for Time Use Research (IATUR), a member of the Taskforce ‘Time Use Survey’ at EUROSTAT and member of the European Research Network on Transitions in Youth.