Lifestyle Preferences and Strategies of Spanish Working Mothers: A Matter of Choice?

Abstract

There is a rich debate surrounding the causes of women’s heterogeneous work–life orientations and strategies. This article focuses on the debate between postmodern individualistic approaches and gender approaches that emphasise the pervasiveness of socio-structural factors. After offering a profile of Spanish women in the twenty-first century, we present the results of qualitative research based on 30 semi-structured interviews with working mothers from different social backgrounds. We discuss Hakim’s ‘preference theory’ by exposing how social class shapes Spanish working mothers’ work–life attitudes and behaviour and how these further change over the life cycle or as a result of changing contexts.

Keywords:

• Occupational class
• gender
• employment
• family
• lifestyle preferences
• Spain
• women
• working women

Acknowledgments

We wish to thank Olga Salido for her help in the preparation of this paper, which was part of a research project (‘Economic Cycle, Inequality and Employment: The Impact of Women’s Labour Force Participation on Inequality. Spain, 1995–2005’) that she directed and which was funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (2009–11). An earlier version of the paper was presented in 2011 at the Research Network 14 of the X European Sociological Association Conference in Geneva and at an international seminar on ‘Work and Family Dilemmas across Europe’ at the Instituto de Estudios Avanzados del Centro Superior de Investigaciones Científicas in Córdoba. We are grateful to Clare Lyonette, Rossana Trifiletti, Constanza Tobío, Margarita León, Margarita Torre and Daniel Guinea for their comments. We also thank Jorge Sola and Nacho Sánchez de la Yncera for their feedback and support, and Stephanie Law for her language corrections. This work has been supported by the Public University of Navarra under its postdoctoral fellowships programme.

Notes

1. The rationale of the EGP model is to differentiate positions within the labour market and production units, as well as the employment relations they entail, in order to capture their effects on the distribution of life chances.