ABSTRACT
During most of the twentieth century, families were organized according to the so-called male breadwinner family: the father worked full-time and the mother stayed at home to care for the children. In the past few decades, this model has been in the process of being replaced all over Europe by a new form of familial organisation: the dual-earner family. In this model, childcare responsibilities and domestic work have to be addressed after work as well as shared between the partners or outsourced altogether. The fact that both parents work leads to organisational challenges that can lead to work-life conflicts, that is, “a form of interrole conflict in which the role pressures from the work and family domains are mutually incompatible in some respect” (Greenhaus and Beuttel 1985, p. 77). This change of the family model is linked to changes in the economic situation in European countries. While western European countries saw multiple economic crises since the late 1970s and rising unemployment rates as well as rising international competition, eastern European countries faced the transformation from socialist systems to market economies, thus giving up full employment and changing not only their economic but also their social system. This led to the integration of the female work force into the economic system in western countries and the need for many couples to earn two incomes in order to live comfortably on, or even cope with, the household income both in the west and in the east. In this article, we examine the factors that influence the work-life conflict of working couples. We furthermore investigate whether there are differences in these factors before and during the financial crises that most European countries have been facing since the second half of 2008.
