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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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, more and more experiments with a reduction in working time are taking place. Most experiments and introductions of shorter workweeks do not leave the choice of the type/form of reduction up to employees, but to employers. An experiment with a 30-hour workweek in a women's organisation in Belgium was rather unique in the sense that employees were free to choose how to reduce their working hours on a weekly basis. Based on longitudinal survey and time-diary data as well as in-depth interviews and focus groups, this article investigates what form of working time reduction was preferred by the female employees and what factors influenced these preferences. The life course perspective is taken as a lens through which we analyse women's preferences and choices. Results show that there was a clear preference for having one day off per week instead of shorter daily hours. This choice was mostly related to meso-factors concerning work and private circumstances and is not fixed but rather dynamic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on leisure and time poverty has mainly focused on the duration of time and on the profile of the time poor. Using the 2013 Flemish Time-Use Data, this article investigates the influence of multiple dimensions of time wealth on leisure activities and leisure patterns for the working population. The four temporal dimensions used are leisure duration, leisure during the weekend, fragmentation of leisure, and subjective feeling of time pressure. Additionally, the article investigates if these dimensions affect working women and men differently. Findings indicate a significant association of the duration of leisure with many other leisure variables. However, other dimensions such as fragmentation of leisure seem to also play a significant role in shaping leisure patterns. Differentiating between working women and men especially made us reflect on the different effect of fragmentation for the leisure of men and women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on Joan Acker's notion of the ideal worker (1990) and Karen Ashcraft's notion of the 'glass slipper' (2013), this paper investigates the organising practices that gender the occupation of artist manager and the music industry, and how women artist managers construct an identity in an occupation that is tailored on a male ideal manager, made to fit a man's shoe. Empirically, we draw on thirteen semi-structured interviews with nine women artist managers, two women former artist managers, and two women former students of Music Management. In line with existing literature, our findings show that the Flemish music industry is organised around practices that reflect hegemonic masculinity, and that women managers mimic many of these practices to fit the ideal manager, and, although they see the gender inequality, they do not challenge it. At the same time, they construct an occupational identity by reframing stereotypical feminine competences as indispensable for being a good manager. By making a business case for these competences, they, however, paradoxically also reproduce those same notions of gender that they aim to overcome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]