Recipe for female happiness: family, work and a man who knows how to load and unload the washing machine. These are the results of the research project, which cost 160-thousand pounds of taxpayers’ money.
British women are happy, if an organization is their way of life differs from traditional values, and no longer want to be housewives and stay at home, caring for children, read the results of a study published by the Council for Economic and Social Research.
“Our findings contradict the claims that women would be happier if it went back to the traditional role of housewife,” – said study leader Professor Rosemary Crompton, City University of London.
“The recipe for personal happiness, family satisfaction and reducing stress, obtained at home, apparently in a combination of liberal attitudes to work outside the home and a more equitable division of household responsibilities.”
“Men are often neglected laundry and ironing, and are not engaged in housekeeping. However, they are more than ever before, giving time to children, minor repairs, cooking and shopping. They are the best French and Portuguese men and the difference between them and Scandinavian men is insignificant” .
Study focused on women’s lives in Britain and Portugal, as the final stage of a comparative study of family relations, employment and work outside the home in the UK and Europe.
The results showed that the conflict between family and work is associated more with the way people work, what with the fact of working, and depends heavily on the availability of part-time employment and on gender policy in relation to working time.
In the UK, researchers found a correlation between the level of stress among women and their ambitions.
“Women who climb the corporate ladder in the UK, often have a longer working day and can not afford high-quality services for child care and professional workers to work at home” – says Professor Crompton.
“In Portugal, the career advancement of women means the promotion of an orderly hierarchy. They have shorter working hours than similar women in Britain, and they have greater access to professional help at home.”
The conflict between life and work was more noticeable in those Portuguese women, who are engaged in monotonous or manual labor than in the same British women.
“This is hardly surprising, because many Portuguese women with children under 15 years, employs more than 68 hours per week. However, in the UK in this group of full-time employed only 29% of women,” – says Professor Crompton.
The study used the scale of the level of conflict between work and family, developed by the research group. Men and women of the EU asked questions, including how often they are coming from work, too exhausted to do household chores, and how often they “can hardly concentrate at work because of domestic problems.”
These results showed that, despite the large number of Portuguese men and women, busy full time, among them more people oriented to family values than among the British.