Work-family entanglement: drawing lessons from the complex lives of low-income women

Work–family concerns that hinder progress towards gender equality, such as women’s disproportionate care work and masculine workplace norms, mostly centre around white-collar middle-class lives (Jaga and Ollier-Malaterre 2022). Concepts like ‘work–family boundary management’ are helpful in understanding how people combine work and family when they have some choice, for example how they blur boundaries between work and family when working remotely. However, concepts that assume choice and boundaries are insufficient for understanding the lives of the vast majority of low-income women across the world, particularly those who occupy precarious forms of informal or non-standard work and who live in diverse family structures that may cross geographical distances, as in the case of migrant work arrangements. This chapter aims to expand conceptualizations of the work-family nexus with the goal of offering new insights into and from the lived realities of low-income women. From these women’s perspectives, choice – which envisages boundaries between work and family life – is a rare privilege. We address the following questions: how would we conceptualize the relationship between work and family were we to begin with the experiences of marginalized low-income women workers rather than privileged white-collar workers; and what new strategies emerge from such a conceptualization for tackling
gender inequality and reducing the challenges of combining work and family?

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